Marie Bashkirtseff

Born: 1858, Havrontsi (Poltava Province)
Died: 1884, Paris
Movements:
Impressionism

Painter, writer. Born into a wealthy family of the Ukrainian nobility in the village of Havrontsi near Poltava (1858). Lived abroad with her mother after her parents divorced, visiting Austria, Germany and Switzerland (1868–70) and settling in Nice (1870). Moved to Paris (1877), where she studied at the Académie Julian and was instructed by Jules Bastien-Lepage. Member of the Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs and Cercle des artistes russes à Paris. Joined the Société le droit des femmes (1880) and wrote feminist articles under the pseudonym of Pauline Orrel for Hubertine Auclert’s newspaper La Citoyenne (1881). Corresponded with Guy de Maupassant (1884). Kept a candid diary in French, which caused a stir when it was published posthumously in Paris (1887). Died at the age of twenty-five of tuberculosis and buried in a mausoleum designed by Émile Bastien-Lepage at the Cimetière de Passy in Paris (1884). Contributed to the Paris Salon (1880–84), Union des femmes (1884) and a posthumous one-woman show in Amsterdam (1887). After her death, the artist’s mother donated 141 works to the Russian Museum in St Petersburg (1908), which was later forced to transfer two paintings to the Dnepropetrovsk Museum of Art (1930) and 127 works to Ukrainian Narkompros (1932). Sixty-six paintings vanished when the Museum of Ukrainian Art was evacuated from Kharkiv during the Second World War (1941).

1884, Paris

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