Portrait de Mme X

Overview

Portrait de Mme X (pastel and charcoal, 56 × 46,5 cm, 1884) is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, inv. RF 1565 (also recorded as JdeP 515, from its time at the Jeu de Paume). It was purchased in 1885 — the year of the posthumous memorial exhibition, and the same year the French State bought Un meeting.

It is one of the last things she made. She died on 31 October 1884, at twenty-five.

Description

Pastel worked with charcoal, 56 × 46,5 cm — the same medium and roughly the same scale as the Dina pastel that won her the mention honorable at the Salon of 1883, and the medium in which the juries were readiest to admit her.

The sitter is not identified. "Mme X" is a nineteenth-century exhibition convention for withholding a private sitter's name, not a description of an unknown woman; whoever she was, the family or the artist chose not to publish it, and no source consulted here recovers it. The six pastels listed in the 1885 posthumous catalogue (nos. 101–106) are all named — Louis de Canrobert, Mlle de Villevieille, Mlle Eral, Mlle Babanine, Mlle Armandine, Mlle Dinah — and none of them is this one, which leaves the identification open in both directions.

Making of the Work

Nothing is known about the making of this pastel. It is not identifiable in the diary, and the pastels Marie does describe herself making in 1883–84 — the portrait of Louis de Canrobert (¶¶ 101.0310, 101.0325, 101.0587), a head of Villevieille (¶ 099.0376), the second Dina "harmonie blanche" (¶ 102.0059) — are all named sitters and none of them has been matched to it. Its 1884 date places it in the last year of her life, when she was working on Un meeting, on the unfinished La Rue, and, in the last months, barely working at all.

References in Diary

No diary mention has been found. A systematic sweep of carnets 097–106 (October 1882 to October 1884, the only range in which an 1884 pastel could be recorded) returned no match: every "Portrait de Mme…" in that range refers to a picture by someone else — Bastien-Lepage's Mme Drouet (¶¶ 103.0135, 103.0655), Sargent's Mme Gautreau (¶ 104.0558). If Marie wrote about making this pastel, she did not name it in a way that can be recognised.

Related Entries

- #Portrait_Dina_pastel — her other Orsay pastel, and her prize-winner
- #Un_meeting — the picture of the same year that the State bought in 1885
- #Portrait · #Salon · #Art_practice

Sources

- Musée d'Orsay, inv. RF 1565 / JdeP 515 — medium, dimensions, 1885 acquisition
- Catalogue des œuvres de Mlle Bashkirtseff, Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 9 February 1885, pastels nos. 101–106 — Gallica ark:/12148/bpt6k131932r (consulted as a negative check on the sitter's identity)
- Image: Wikimedia Commons, Marie Bashkirtseff – portrait of Mme X