Tête de jeune femme (Jeune femme à la plume bleue)

Overview

Tête de jeune femme, also circulated as Jeune femme à la plume bleue (oil on canvas, 55 × 45 cm, c. 1878), is in the Musée Ziem at Martigues, inv. ZP 147. It was given by the artist's mother for the museum's founding in 1908 — one of a series of gifts by which Maria Stepanovna placed her daughter's work in French public collections between 1902 and 1920.

If the c. 1878 date holds, this is a picture from Marie's first year at the Académie Julian — she entered on 3 October 1877 — and one of the earliest surviving oils by her.

Description

Oil on canvas, 55 × 45 cm: a head of a young woman in a hat trimmed with a blue feather. The two titles in circulation describe the same object from two directions — Tête de jeune femme is the studio designation, Jeune femme à la plume bleue the descriptive one that took hold later.

Image gap. The only file on Wikimedia Commons is a 460 × 605 px blog scan, below the resolution this project publishes, so this entry carries no illustration.

Making of the Work

No diary passage can be attributed to this picture, and the attempt to find one is instructive. Carnets 076–086 (November 1877 – December 1879) were swept for it and contain no mention by title. What they contain in abundance is têtes — but these are the weekly concours heads painted from a set model in the atelier, judged and ranked, not autonomous pictures: "On a trouvé du très bon dans ma tête et du pas mal dans l'académie" (¶ 076.0407, 15 December 1877); "Ma tête est mieux que les dernières que j'ai peintes" (¶ 086.0321, 18 October 1879).

A hat with a blue feather is not atelier costume, which argues that this was a picture of a friend or a paid sitter rather than one of the concours heads — but that is an inference, not evidence. The honest position is that the work is not attributable from the diary.

References in Diary

No mention found. The two paragraphs listed below are offered as context only — the atelier concours heads of the same period — and are explicitly not identifications of this painting:

- 1877-12-15, ¶ 076.0407 — a concours tête and académie judged at Julian's
- 1879-10-18, ¶ 086.0321 — "Ma tête est mieux que les dernières que j'ai peintes"

Related Entries

- #Julian — the Académie Julian, where she was in her first year when this was painted
- #Caricature_Rodolphe_Julian — the other surviving work from the same period
- #Portrait · #Peinture · #Art_practice

Sources

- Musée Ziem, Martigues, inv. ZP 147 — dimensions, medium, provenance (gift of the artist's mother for the museum's founding, 1908)
- Wikimedia Commons, Young Lady Wearing a Hat with a Blue Feather — 460 × 605 px, the only reproduction located
- The diary itself, carnets 076–086 (negative finding)