Femme orientale

Overview

Femme orientale (oil on canvas, 1882) is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, Nice — one of three Bashkirtseff paintings there, alongside the Autoportrait à la palette and the portrait of her brother Paul. The Nice group came to the city through the artist's mother.

The picture belongs to the orientalisme that ran through French Salon painting for most of the century: a European model in Eastern dress, studio-made, the subject a costume rather than a place. Marie never travelled east of Vienna. 1882 was the year she was working hard at heads and studies between her two big Salon efforts, and this is best understood as one of them.

Description

Oil on canvas; dimensions not published by the museum. No title in the 1885 posthumous exhibition catalogue matches it, though that catalogue contains a great many untitled Études and Têtes among which it could easily sit — no. 100, Japonaise, shows she was working in this costume-portrait vein at least once more.

Making of the Work

Nothing is documented about the making of this picture. It is not identifiable in the diary under this or any related title, and the museum publishes no object record for it. What can be said is contextual: in 1882 Marie was working at Nice in the spring and in Paris from May, producing the great pastel of Dina, the head of Irma that became La Parisienne, Thérèse, and a run of studies — a productive year in which an undated costume study would be entirely at home.

References in Diary

No diary mention has been found. The title was searched across the full range in which an 1882 painting could appear — carnets 060–075, 076–086, 087–096 and 097–106 — and returns nothing in any of them. Either Marie never wrote about it, or she called it something else.

Related Entries

- #Autoportrait_a_la_palette · #Portrait_Paul — the other two Bashkirtseff paintings at Nice
- #Peinture · #Tableau · #Art_practice

Sources

- Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, Nice — attribution and location
- Image, dating and attribution: Wikimedia Commons (1418 × 1542 px)
- Catalogue des œuvres de Mlle Bashkirtseff, Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 9 February 1885 — Gallica ark:/12148/bpt6k131932r (consulted; no matching title)