Горе (Sorrow)

Overview

Горе ("Sorrow") is one of the three Bashkirtseff paintings still in Ukraine, and the only one outside Kharkiv and Dnipro: it belongs to the Sumy Regional Art Museum named after Nykanor Onatsky. The museum dates it 1882 and also says it was painted during her stay at home in 1881 — the two statements are not reconciled anywhere published. Its dimensions have not been published, and no photograph of it could be located in any language, on Commons or elsewhere.

It reached Sumy the same way the Kharkiv pictures reached Kharkiv: the works Marie's mother gave to the Museum of Alexander III in St Petersburg were sent on to Soviet Ukraine in 1930–1932 and distributed among Ukrainian museums. See The Kharkiv Lost Works for the provenance chain and what happened to the rest of it.

Description

Only the museum's own text describes it, and this entry can do no better than paraphrase: a woman at twilight, her face hidden in her palm, painted contre-jour — against the light — and left somewhat sketchy in handling.

That description is worth holding beside La Douleur de Nausicaa, the sculpture Marie began in 1883: «une femme debout qui pleure la tête dans ses mains» — a standing woman weeping with her head in her hands. The hidden face, the grief legible only from posture, is a motif she came back to. No source connects the two works, and none is claimed here; but if Горе is really of 1881–82 it is the earlier statement of the same idea.

Making of the Work

No passage in the diary has been matched to it. The sweep of carnets 087–096, which covers the summer of 1881 at Gavronzi in detail, found one substantial picture from that stay: a life-size peasant woman standing against a wattle fence with water buckets at her feet, painted outdoors under a portable two-room pavilion (092.0104, 092.0110, 092.0143, 092.0198, and Julian's demolition of it at 092.0362). That canvas has no hidden face and no contre-jour effect, and the identification with Горе was explicitly rejected by the sweep. If the Sumy picture is the 1881 one the museum says it is, Marie did not describe it — or described it in terms nobody has yet recognised.

The picture is at risk, and this should be said plainly. The Sumy museum's roof was damaged in 2023 and its windows were lost in the ballistic strike of 13 April 2025. Sumy is thirty kilometres from the Russian border. The collection is not fully evacuated, and the acting director treats the question of what has been moved as classified. Nothing published states where Горе is or what condition it is in. Any claim that three Bashkirtseff paintings survive in Ukraine should carry the date on which it was made.

References in Diary

None identified. For the 1881 Gavronzi painting campaign — the most likely context if the museum's 1881 dating is right — see 1881-06-12 (092.0104), 1881-06-16 (092.0110), 1881-06-27 (092.0143), 1881-07-06 (092.0198), 1881-07-28 (092.0344), 1881-07-31 (092.0354) and 1881-08-03 (092.0362).

Related Entries

- #Kharkiv_Lost_Works — the dispersal that brought it to Sumy, and the losses that make it precious
- #At_a_Book — the survivor at Kharkiv
- #La_Douleur_de_Nausicaa — the same motif of hidden grief, in bronze
- #Art_Practice

Sources

- Sumy Regional Art Museum (Onatsky) — the museum's own text on the painting, as reported in the project artworks catalog
- Ukrainska Pravda / Life, 2025 — the Sumy Art Museum damaged a second time, its painting collection still held there
- S. I. Bocharova, Велика українська енциклопедія — Башкирцева, Марія Костянтинівна (the 1930–1932 transfers to Ukraine)