Femme lisant à l'angle d'un piano
Také známý jako: Femme lisant à l'angle d'un piano, Femme lisant au piano, Woman Reading at the Corner of a Piano, Woman Reading beside a Piano
Overview
Femme lisant à l'angle d'un piano is a drawing — crayon, charcoal, frotté and gratté, 24,6 × 19,2 cm on a mount of 53 × 40 cm — in the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, inv. PPD929. It was given by the artist's mother in 1907, five years after she gave the same museum La Parisienne.
It is undated. Marie left far more drawings than paintings — the 1885 posthumous catalogue lists 118 of them against 100 paintings, plus another eighty-odd academic studies from the model — but almost none of that graphic work survives in public collections. This sheet is one of the few, and Paris Musées has released it under CC0 at 4317 × 5531 px, so it is also one of the best-reproduced things she made.
Description
A woman reading, seated at the corner of a piano. The technique is worth noticing: alongside crayon and charcoal the museum records frotté (rubbed) and gratté (scratched back) — the drawing is worked additively and subtractively, lights lifted out of the black rather than left as blank paper. That is studio-trained handling, not sketchbook shorthand.
The subject joins the two occupations that fill Marie's own days more than any others besides painting: reading and music. She read voraciously and played the piano, the harp and the guitar; a woman reading at the corner of a piano is very close to a picture of her own drawing-room life.
A possible catalogue match, offered as a guess only. The 1885 exhibition catalogue includes among its drawings a La Lecture (no. 116), and reproduced four drawings after nature, one of them also called La lecture. Whether either is this sheet is unknown — "La Lecture" is a generic title and she drew people reading more than once.
Making of the Work
Nothing is documented. The drawing is undated by the museum, unmatched in the diary, and unattached to any recorded episode.
One related but distinct idea does appear in the diary: on 27 December 1882 Marie sketches out, on going to bed, a picture she wants to make — "un homme de profil et dans l'ombre joue du piano, deux autres l'écoutent" (¶ 097.0289), one listener with his head against the base of a statue, another astride a chair with a cigarette. That is a lamp-lit interior with a man at the keyboard and is not this drawing; it is recorded here only because it shows the piano-corner interior was a composition she thought in. She never mentions it again.
References in Diary
No diary mention has been found, and none is likely to be found by title: the sheet is undated, generically titled, and one of hundreds of drawings she made without recording.
- Related but distinct: 1882-12-27, ¶ 097.0289 — a planned lamp-lit interior with a man playing the piano and two listeners, sketched once and never mentioned again
Related Entries
- #Reading · #Music_theme — the two occupations the drawing puts together
- #Question_du_divorce — her Salon debut, also a woman reading
- #Art_practice · #Peinture
Sources
- Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, inv. PPD929 — medium, dimensions, 1907 gift of the artist's mother; record and IIIF manifest published via Paris Musées Collections
- Image: Wikimedia Commons, Femme lisant à l'angle d'un piano, PPD929 — 4317 × 5531 px, CC0
- Catalogue des œuvres de Mlle Bashkirtseff, Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 9 February 1885, drawings nos. 107–224 — Gallica ark:/12148/bpt6k131932r
- The diary itself, carnet 097