Autoportrait à la palette

Overview

Autoportrait à la palette (oil on canvas) is the image by which Marie Bashkirtseff is known. The painter stands with palette and brush, a harp behind her, looking directly out at the viewer. It hangs in the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret in Nice, inv. N.Mba 1982, given to the city by the artist's mother in 1920, and is on permanent display. Nice holds the largest surviving group of her work.

The museum's own text on the picture is worth quoting: "Her posture and determined gaze, challenging the viewer, nevertheless reveal the profound melancholy of this young woman." That double reading — the challenge and the melancholy in the same face — is exactly what makes the picture the standing portrait of the diarist.

Description

Both the date and the dimensions are disputed, and this entry does not resolve them.

- Date. Wikidata gives 1880; the museum's own label gives 1882–1883. Unresolved. "c. 1880–1883" is the honest form.
- Dimensions. The museum gives 92,3 × 73,5 cm; Wikidata gives 114 × 95,2 cm. The 1885 posthumous exhibition catalogue lists as its very first item a Portrait de Mlle Bashkirtseff measuring 0,90 × 0,75 m — which matches the museum's figure almost exactly and argues strongly against the Wikidata measurement. This entry follows the museum.

Image gap. The only reproductions on Wikimedia Commons are 466 × 600 px. For her single most iconic image this is the most conspicuous illustration gap in the whole project, and it is not one this entry can close: the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice has digitised essentially none of its Bashkirtseff holdings. The picture can be seen on the city's own Trésors de Nice page.

Making of the Work

The diary does not record the making of this canvas. No entry in the carnets has been matched to it — which is consistent with the disputed 1880–1883 dating, since the years in question are densely documented and a picture of this importance would be hard to miss. What the diary does preserve is the lineage: two earlier attempts at the same subject, both of them revealing.

The first is at Nice on 4 May 1877 (¶ 071.0031), and she is caught in the act: "Marcuard m'a trouvée barbouillant mon propre portrait. Si je réussis à faire une esquisse ce sera déjà bien, les ombres et les couleurs par cœur, ce n'est pas une plaisanterie." She is working from memory, without a mirror sitting, five months before she ever enters the Académie Julian.

The second, on 23 March 1879 (¶ 084.0422), is the fully self-dramatising version: with thirty minutes of daylight left she sketched herself "sur une toile de 4, debout retournée violemment sur moi-même, la traîne longue m'entourant et me dessinant, mise en Robespierre, en révolutionnaire, la tête haute et l'air de braver l'univers…" — working from mirror sketches in her album, and wanting, she says, to immortaliser her habitual black bodice, batiste chemisette and ruffled jabot. She notes it will stay unfinished: "Demain je l'arrangerai sans le finir." A toile de 4 is roughly 33 × 24 cm, so this is a small panel and not the Nice canvas — but "l'air de braver l'univers" is precisely the expression the Nice museum describes three or four years later.

References in Diary

The Nice canvas itself has no confirmed mention in the diary. The two documented antecedents are:

- 1877-05-04, ¶ 071.0031 — the first self-portrait attempt recorded anywhere in the diary, at Nice, painted from memory
- 1879-03-23, ¶ 084.0422 — the "Robespierre" self-portrait sketched in half an hour of failing light, from mirror studies, deliberately left unfinished

Related Entries

- #Art_practice — the thematic tag collecting Marie's work as a painter
- #Portrait · #Peinture · #Salon
- #Nice — where both the first attempt and the finished canvas now live
- #Portrait_Paul · #Femme_orientale — the other two Bashkirtseff paintings at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice

Sources

- Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, Nice — 19th-century collection — inventory number, provenance, museum text
- Trésors de Nice, Autoportrait à la palette
- POP/Joconde 08800000031
- Catalogue des œuvres de Mlle Bashkirtseff, Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 9 February 1885, no. 1 (Portrait de Mlle Bashkirtseff, 0,90 × 0,75 m) — Gallica ark:/12148/bpt6k131932r
- The diary itself, carnets 071 and 084