Portrait of a girl (Armandine Babanin?)

Overview

Portrait of a girl (Armandine Babanin?), the Ostrava gallery's title (Portrét dívky; oil on canvas, 58 × 44,5 cm, signed and dated 1880, inv. O0827), long known online as Portrait de Jenny or Petite fille, 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 × 44,5 cm — a small, intimate format, the size Marie used for heads and single-figure studies rather than for Salon pictures. The sitter is disputed. The gallery proposes, with a question mark, Armandine Babanin, a girl of Marie's mother's family (sbirky.msk.cz). The name "Jenny" comes only from the Wikimedia Commons file and the fan site it cites (bashkirtseff.com.ar), and no Jenny has been matched to anyone in the diary's circle. Neither name is documented by the artist.

What the gallery's own record says. The Ostrava gallery's catalogue (Sbírkový portál MSK) settles the date and corrects the title. It catalogues the picture as Portrét dívky (Armandine Babanin?) ("Portrait of a girl, Armandine Babanin?"), inventory O0827, oil on canvas, 58 × 44,5 cm, signed lower left "M.Bashkirtseff 1880". It describes a somewhat melancholy dark-haired girl, her hair in a scarf, in a white blouse with a small gold pendant on a dark ribbon, and notes paint cracking at the bottom from a deformed canvas, reaching into the signature. It calls the sitter "a girl from the Babanin family", painted during the artist's stay in France, and the work "probably the painter's only work in Bohemia and Slovakia". The date is therefore 1880, as signed. The names Portrait de Jenny and Petite fille come from the Wikimedia Commons file and its fan-site source, not from the museum. The 1885 catalogue lists a Portrait de Mlle Armandine (no. 105), but among the pastels, so it is not this oil. The Armandine of the diary in 1883–84 is a dancer who posed for Les trois Rires (102.0468), not a Babanin, and the museum's question mark should stand.

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 gallery's record (inventory O0827) gives no acquisition history. 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.

The signed date puts it in 1880, the year of her first Salon, when she was painting a long run of heads and portrait studies. No passage of that year has been tied to it, but Marie may name 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

Sources