Portrait de Jenny (Petite fille)

Overview

Portrait de Jenny, also catalogued as Petite fille (oil on canvas, 58 × 45 cm, 1882), hangs in the Galerie výtvarného umění v Ostravě — and it is, as far as this project's research can establish, the only painting by Marie Bashkirtseff in the Czech Republic.

That is worth stating plainly for Czech readers of this diary. Of the roughly 230 works Marie left at her death, some sixty survive; they are scattered across Paris, Nice, Amsterdam, Vienna, Martigues, St Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, Athens and three Ukrainian cities, with sixty-five more lost at Kharkiv in the war. One of the survivors is in Ostrava. A reader in Moravia can stand in front of a canvas painted by the girl whose diary they are reading.

Description

Oil on canvas, 58 × 45 cm — a small, intimate format, the size Marie used for heads and single-figure studies rather than for Salon pictures. The sitter, "Jenny", is not identified: no Jenny has been matched to anyone in the diary's circle, and the alternative title Petite fille suggests the name may have travelled with the picture rather than come from the artist.

On the date. The work is generally given as 1882; at least one French caption dates it 1880. Both are plausible — she was painting children's heads in both years — and this entry does not adjudicate between them.

Making of the Work

Nothing is documented. The picture is not identifiable in the diary, and how it came to Ostrava has not been established here — the Czech gallery's own collection database could not be reached during this research and its inventory number is unknown. Tracing that provenance would be a genuinely useful piece of local research: Marie's mother placed works in French museums between 1902 and 1920 and sent some 140 to St Petersburg, but the route by which one reached Moravia is not part of either story as usually told.

If the 1882 date is right, the picture belongs to a heavily documented year — the spring at Nice, the great pastel of Dina, the head of Irma that became La Parisienne, Thérèse, and a long run of studies — which makes the diary's silence about it a little surprising, and leaves open the possibility that Marie names it somewhere under a description no search has yet caught.

References in Diary

No diary mention has been found. The title was searched across carnets 060–106 and returns nothing; the sweep of carnets 097–106 records "Portrait de Jenny" among its explicit negative findings.

Related Entries

- #Portrait · #Peinture · #Art_practice
- #Portrait_belle_soeur — the other small portrait of 1881–82 that survives in a foreign public collection

Sources

- Galerie výtvarného umění v Ostravě — holding institution (inventory number not established)
- Image, dimensions and dating: Wikimedia Commons — 1999 × 2594 px
- Survival and dispersal figures: the project's 2026-08-13 artworks research catalogue, drawing on the 1885 posthumous exhibition catalogue (Gallica ark:/12148/bpt6k131932r) and the German Lost Art Database records filed by the Kharkiv Art Museum