Marie Bashkirtseff's works

Overview

Marie Bashkirtseff trained as a painter in the women's atelier of the Académie Julian, which she entered on 3 October 1877. She showed at the Salon from 1880 — in 1880 as "Marie Constantin Russ", in 1881 as "Andrey" — and in 1883 the jury gave her a mention honorable for the pastel portrait of her cousin Dina. Un meeting, shown at the Salon of 1884, entered the French national collections within months of her death. How she trained, what she believed about painting and how the diary records it are set out in Art Practice.

The closest thing to a list of everything she made is the catalogue of the memorial exhibition of 9 February 1885: 224 numbered paintings, pastels and drawings, plus five sculptures. Her mother then spent the rest of her life placing the work. Some went to French and Dutch museums and is still there. The bulk, about 141 works, went to the Museum of Alexander III in St Petersburg, and 127 of those were sent on to Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and kept together in Kharkiv. When the occupiers looted and then burned the Kharkiv museum in August 1943, sixty-five of her canvases were lost with it. That history, and the myths that have grown up around it, is told in The Kharkiv Lost Works.

The works

Below are all of Marie's works that have their own entry in this glossary, in order of date. Each says only what its entry can establish: a public collection, a museum attribution that is probable but not established, a private collection, a location that sources dispute, or whereabouts unknown. For many of the lost pictures the diary is now the only description that survives.

Related Entries

Sources