La Liseuse (Die Lesende, Dina Babanina lisant)

Overview

An oil on canvas laid on board, 64 × 53 cm, dated 1880, that came onto the market at the Dorotheum in Vienna in 2021 (object ID 7201837) under the title Die Lesende ("The Reader"). The auction house identified the sitter as Dina Babanina, the artist's cousin. A young woman in black sits at a table with a journal open in front of her, one hand pressed to her forehead and a glass of water by her elbow. It is in a private collection.

Relation to At a Book

The composition is almost the same as that of За книгою (At a Book) in Kharkiv, 63 × 60,5 cm. In both the same fair-haired woman leans over the page with her hand in her hair. They are two distinct canvases: the Vienna picture has a warm olive background and the glass, while the Kharkiv one has a black ground, a bare orange table and no glass. Wikimedia Commons links the two files as versions of each other. The Dorotheum's naming of the sitter as Dina bears on the Ukrainian wall-text tradition that At a Book is a self-portrait. Both identifications are on record and neither is documented by the artist.

The 1885 memorial catalogue lists a Jeune femme lisant (no. 4) at 0,60 × 0,67 m, which is near the Kharkiv canvas in size. Which of the two versions it was, if either, cannot be settled from the catalogue.

References in Diary

None identified. Dina sat for Marie repeatedly in 1880–82 (see Jeune femme lisant « La Question du divorce », 1880, and the pastel of Dina), but no passage describes this picture.

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Sources