Im Nebel (In the Fog)

Overview

Im Nebel — "In the Fog" — is an oil on canvas of 1882, 47 × 55 cm, in the Belvedere, Vienna (inv. 1173). It is the only Bashkirtseff in an Austrian collection, and one of the very few of her paintings anywhere for which a museum-grade reproduction is freely available: the Belvedere publishes a 3508-pixel scan. Most of her surviving work is either unphotographed or circulates as postage-stamp-sized images, which makes this modest little canvas unexpectedly important to anyone trying to see what she painted.

It is also unlike the work she is remembered for. There are no children, no models, no portrait head — it is a townscape, and the subject is the weather.

Description

A broad road runs down and away between buildings dissolved by fog. The palette is almost monochrome — chalk, ochre, grey-green — with everything past the middle distance reduced to a silhouette: a spire, a long low roof, the block of a tenement. In the left foreground a cast-iron street lamp stands against a railing; behind it, on open ground, a row of horses and carts waits, and a few dark figures walk the pavement, one under an umbrella. At the centre, where the road bends, a plume of white steam rises from a single spot of hot orange — the one warm note in the picture. On the right a pavilion-like building with a green roof comes forward out of the haze.

Fog was a real ambition of hers, not an accident of this one canvas. In October 1883 she writes that she wants «des espaces, des brouillards… un tableau de brumes, des ciels» (101.0487–0488), and the landscape she painted the following winter in the avenue on the Île de la Grande Jatte was expressly «par un temps de brouillard, des feuilles sèches» — a foggy day and dry leaves (see Automne). Im Nebel is the earliest surviving statement of that interest.

Making of the Work

No passage in the diary has been identified as describing this picture. A sweep of carnets 060–106 for the fog vocabulary and for the picture's title found nothing that can be attached to it: 1882 is a heavily documented year in the diary, but this canvas is not among the works she names. That is not unusual — she painted far more than she wrote down, and the 1885 catalogue is full of untitled études — but it means the entry rests on the museum record rather than on her own account.

Its later history is documented. The picture was shown in Vienna in 1910 at Die Kunst der Frau ("The Art of Woman"), the large retrospective of women artists mounted by the Vienna Secession; the Austrian Association of Women Artists bought it out of that exhibition and gave it to the Belvedere in 1911. Marie was by then a European celebrity as a diarist, and Die Kunst der Frau was precisely the kind of argument — that women had a history in art — that her Journal was being used to make.

References in Diary

No mention of this painting has been found. The related fog ambitions are at 1883-10-02 (101.0487–0488) and, for the Grande-Jatte landscape, 1883-10-28 (102.0029), 1883-11-01 (102.0033) and 1884-03-01 (103.0412 — see Automne).

Related Entries

- #Automne — the other fog picture, and the one she does describe
- #Art_Practice — her working life
- #Salon — the exhibition system this picture stayed outside of
- #Kharkiv_Lost_Works — why so little of her work survives, and why a good reproduction of a small canvas matters

Sources

- Belvedere, Vienna — Im Nebel, inv. 1173 (year, medium, dimensions, provenance)
- Wikimedia Commons — Im Nebel (3508 × 2913, public domain; the file used here is a downscaled copy)
- Die Kunst der Frau, Vienna Secession, 1910 — the exhibition from which the Austrian Association of Women Artists acquired the picture