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 corroborate the 1876 date. In the Poltava countryside in the late summer of 1876 (the family's estate at Gavronzi, near Poltava) she writes on 26 August 1876 that she has quickly sketched two portraits, "mon père et Paul. Cela a duré trente-cinq minutes" (¶ 065.0503), and on 8 September 1876 (¶ 066.0097): "Si je réussis le portrait de Paul ce sera miracle car il ne pose pas et aujourd'hui j'ai travaillé pendant quinze minutes seule, seule pas tout à fait car j'avais en face de moi Michel qui ose être amoureux de moi." A sitter who will not pose, fifteen minutes of work, a doubtful result: this is the portrait of the brother, in the right year and the right place. The diary does not say that it was finished, and the later paragraphs of carnet 066 do not mention it again.

That makes the museum's date plausible, though the match between the diary's attempt and the Nice picture is an inference: Marie only says she is trying, and the Nice file is attributed to 1876 on the Commons description alone. The works that sit around it are the Collignon portrait of June 1876 and the portrait of her grandmother of June 1877 (Portrait de grand-maman).

A second reference comes three years later: 17 February 1879, "L'après-midi je fais le portrait de Paul" (¶ 084.0240) — 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. Not this work: ¶ 079.0510 (22 April 1878), "faire le portrait de Paul de Cassagnac", concerns the journalist and politician Paul de Cassagnac, not her brother.

References in Diary

Related Entries

Sources