Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff

Georgette

Également connu sous : Georgette, Georgette ou autoportrait, Portrait au chapeau de roses

Culture · Art
A young woman in a straw bonnet heaped with pink roses, tied under the chin with a white bow, in a pale blue jacket
Georgette, 1881, oil on canvas, 56 × 47 cm, Musée du château, Nérac (CNAP FNAC 864). Low-resolution copy Musée du château, Nérac / CNAP — public domain (PD-Art), via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marie-Bashkirtseff-Art-Painting-Georgette-1881.jpg)

Overview

Georgette is an oil on canvas of 1881, 56 × 47 cm (84 × 75 cm framed), owned by the French State through the Centre national des arts plastiques (FNAC 864) and deposited at the Musée du château de Nérac (Lot-et-Garonne) under D.885.1.1. The Joconde notice titles it Georgette ; ou autoportait [sic]: a young woman in bust length, turned three-quarters to the viewer against a dark ground, in a pale-blue jacket, wearing a large straw hat trimmed with six pink roses and tied under the chin with a broad white bow.

The sitter

Two identifications are on record and neither is settled. A label on the back of the frame reads "MARIE BARSHKIRTSEFF / (auto-Portrait) / Musée de Nérac / 1881 Georgette", which is where the self-portrait idea comes from. The notice also records the hypothesis of Tatiana Mojenok, who saw the picture at Nérac in July 2020, that the model is Irma, the Académie Julian model who sat for La Parisienne. This entry passes both on as the museum states them.

History and exhibitions

The notice names the previous owner as "Maria Bashkirtseff (née Stepanovna Babanina)", the artist's mother, with the date 1883, and records the mode of acquisition by the State as unknown. The frame carries old Nérac inventory numbers (Seignoret 1887, no. 43), so the picture was at Nérac by 1887. It was lent to Le temps de Monsieur Fallières (Agen, Musée des beaux-arts, 1986), to Marie Bashkirtseff : peintre et sculpteur, écrivain et témoin de son temps (Nice, Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, 1 July – 29 October 1995) and to the Italian exhibition L'Arte delle Donne, dal Rinascimento al Surrealismo.

The 1885 catalogue. The memorial catalogue reproduces this picture: its plate captioned Georgette shows the same woman in the rose-trimmed bonnet with the white bow, turned the same way (Gallica view 73). The list of paintings gives Georgette as no. 14, but at 0,20 × 0,15 m, far smaller than the Nérac canvas. Either the printed size is wrong or no. 14 is a different, smaller Georgette. The plate at least shows that the Nérac canvas was exhibited in 1885 under the title Georgette, which tells against its being a self-portrait.

References in Diary

The name Georgette does not occur in the diary text of `_original`.

Related Entries

Sources