Real del Sarte was born in Paris as the daughter of François Delsarte, and attended the Académie Julian from 1874 where she was taught by Gustave Boulanger, Tony Robert-Fleury and Jules Lefebvre.

She is the blond girl in the middle of Marie Bashkirtseff's 1881 painting In the Studio.

[1] She became a teacher there while still attending classes and married her cousin, the sculptor Louis Désiré Réal on 1 March 1887.

After that she began signing her works Real del Sarte.

was one of the works featured in Women Painters of the World by Walter Shaw Sparrow (1905); one of the first books that treated 19th-century female artists as worthy of serious attention.