Marie Bashkirtseff

Previously in the collection of Pierre Pascale (1890-1983), historian, slavist and translator, who lived in Russia from the end of the First World War until 1933 (according to inscription on the stretcher)

Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs: Catalogue des oeuvres de Mlle Bashkirtseff, Paris, 1885, possibly listed as no. 11 Nature morte

In her journal, published posthumously in 1887, Bashkirtseff noted on 19 September 1877: “I don’t know why exactly, but I think I shall like to live in Paris. It seems to me that a year in the atelier Julian will lay a good foundation”, adding a few days later that she “found time to go to the atelier Julian, the only one of any note here for women” (M. Bashkirtseff, The Journal of a Young Artist, New York, 1889, p. 140). Born into a wealthy Russian noble family near Poltava in present-day Ukraine, Marie Bashkirtseff spent her youth mainly in Europe. Her earlier ambition to became a singer was thwarted by an illness that affected her voice, and she decided to pursue a career as a painter instead, hoping that fame would guarantee her the life of an independent woman. She settled in Paris in 1877, twenty years before the École des Beaux-Arts would admit its first female students. Like other women and foreigners at the time, Bashkirtseff therefore enrolled at the private Académie Julian.

Studying first under Tony Robert-Fleury, Bashkirtseff’s work was strongly influenced by the naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who also became a close friend. While Bastien-Lepage’s paintings show peasants working the fields, Bashkirtseff turned to the streets of Paris, transposing the themes of her friend and mentor to an urban setting. Among her best-known works are A meeting, which she exhibited at the Salon of 1884 to great acclaim. It was acquired for the nation the following year and is today at the Musée d’Orsay.

The Salon of 1884 would be Bashkirtseff's last (she had first exhibited there in 1880). On 31 October, she succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of just twenty-five. In only a few years, she had succeeded to make a name for herself as an accomplished painter, and through her work and her diary, she inspired a whole generation of women. Marina Tsvetaeva, who had lost her mother to tuberculosis, dedicated her first collection of poems, the self-published Evening Album (1910), to Bashkirtseff.

Today, paintings by Bashkirtseff rarely ever appear on the market. The catalogue of her work published in 1885 lists only 100 oils, in addition to drawings, pastels and sculptures, and many of her works were lost during the Second World War. The listing includes a Nature morte with nearly identical dimensions, which might well be the present lot (cat. no. 11). Bashkirtseff might also have referred to this painting in her diary entry for the 20th of December 1882: “The great, the real, the incomparable Bastien-Lepage and his brother dined with us this evening. […] He stayed until midnight. He thought a bottle I had painted very good. ‘That is the way you must work’, he added, ‘with patience and concentration; use your best efforts to copy nature faithfully.’” (M. Bashkirtseff, op. cit., p. 315).