La Cigarette (Portrait de femme assise, une cigarette à la main)
Also known as: La Cigarette, Portrait de femme assise, de face, une cigarette dans la main droite, Portrait de femme (dessin, Orsay), Woman with a Cigarette, Portrait of a Woman (drawing)
Overview
A small black-chalk drawing, 24,5 × 18,5 cm, of a woman in a dark dress and hat sitting square to the viewer in a studio, with a cigarette in her right hand. It is in the French national collections, catalogued by the Musée d'Orsay as Portrait de femme under RF 39089. The Joconde notice gives the fuller descriptive title Portrait de femme assise, de face, une cigarette dans la main droite. It is undated.
The record
According to the Joconde notice the sheet is black chalk (pierre noire), pasted onto another sheet, earlier inventory number JdeP 516. It came to the State in 1908 as a gift from the artist's mother, together with Intimité (RF 39090), and passed through the Jeu de Paume and the Musée d'Art moderne before reaching the Orsay collections.
*It is the drawing the 1885 catalogue calls La Cigarette. The catalogue lists La Cigarette* as drawing no. 117, and among its "Quatre dessins d'après nature" it reproduces a plate with that caption. The plate shows the same composition as the Orsay sheet: the seated woman in a hat, the canvases stacked behind her, the cigarette held low in the right hand (Gallica views 45–48). The title used here is therefore Marie's own exhibition title.
References in Diary
No passage has been matched to the drawing. The sitter is not identified.
Related Entries
- #Intimite — the drawing given with it in 1908, also reproduced in 1885
- #Femme_lisant_piano — the third of the four 1885 plates whose original survives
- #Marie_Bashkirtseff_Works
- #Dessin
Sources
- Musée d'Orsay, Portrait de femme, RF 39089 — musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/portrait-de-femme-98707
- POP / Joconde notice 50350228854 — pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/joconde/50350228854 (photo © RMN, use subject to authorisation)
- Catalogue des œuvres de Mlle Bashkirtseff, Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 9 February 1885, p. 31, no. 117, and the plate La Cigarette — Gallica ark:/12148/bpt6k131932r