Portrait de son frère Paul

Overview

Portrait de son frère Paul is Marie's portrait of her brother Paul Bashkirtseff, dated 1876 and held by the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret in Nice. If the 1876 date is right, it is one of the earliest surviving works by her hand — painted when she was seventeen or eighteen, more than a year before she entered the Académie Julian in October 1877.

The 1885 posthumous exhibition catalogue lists a Portrait de son frère, 0,65 × 0,54 m, as no. 53. Whether that is this picture is likely but not established.

Description

Oil; dimensions not published by the museum. The best available reproduction is a 821 × 1000 px file on Wikimedia Commons — adequate but not museum-grade. As with the Autoportrait à la palette, the limiting factor is that the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice, which holds the largest surviving group of Bashkirtseff's work, has digitised almost none of it.

Making of the Work

The diary does not corroborate the 1876 date, and this should be said plainly. A full sweep of carnets 060–075 — which covers May 1876 to 31 October 1877, exactly the period in question — found no mention anywhere of Marie painting or drawing her brother. Paul appears constantly in carnet 066 (Poltava, September 1876), but the material there concerns a quarrel over a photograph album (¶¶ 066.0109–066.0118), not painting.

That silence is worth weighing. In these years Marie records her drawing and painting in obsessive detail — the Collignon portrait, the caricatures of Melissano, the portrait of her grandmother, the card players, the Mirage cartoon — so a finished oil portrait of her own brother going unmentioned is unexpected. Either the museum's date is wrong, or the picture belongs to a stretch of days the diary passes over, or it was made somewhere the diary does not follow her.

The one direct diary reference to a portrait of a Paul comes three years later: 17 February 1879, "L'après-midi je fais le portrait de Paul" (¶ 084.0168) — a bald single line with no follow-up anywhere in carnet 084. This is not certainly the same sitter: the paragraph is tagged in the source to `PAUL_FRERE`, and the researcher's own note on it hedges between the brother and a cousin, Paul Babanine. It documents a second, 1879 sitting, not the 1876 canvas.

References in Diary

- No mention of this painting has been found. Carnets 060–075 (May 1876 – October 1877), the range in which an 1876 portrait would fall, contain nothing about painting Paul.
- 1879-02-17, ¶ 084.0168 — "L'après-midi je fais le portrait de Paul." A separate, later sitting; the sitter's identity is not fully secure.

Related Entries

- #Paul — her brother Paul Bashkirtseff
- #Portrait_belle_soeur — her portrait of Paul's wife, five years later
- #Autoportrait_a_la_palette · #Femme_orientale — the other Bashkirtseff paintings at Nice
- #Portrait · #Art_practice

Sources

- Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, Nice — attribution and location
- Image and 1876 dating: Wikimedia Commons
- Catalogue des œuvres de Mlle Bashkirtseff, Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 9 February 1885, no. 53 (Portrait de son frère, 0,65 × 0,54 m) — Gallica ark:/12148/bpt6k131932r
- The diary itself, carnets 060–075 (negative finding) and 084