Marie Bashkirtseff

Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884), born Maria Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva to a wealthy Ukrainian noble family, was a Russian-French painter, sculptor, and diarist who became one of the most discussed women artists of the late nineteenth century. Trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, where she was a star pupil of Tony Robert-Fleury and Jules Bastien-Lepage, Bashkirtseff exhibited at the Salon and produced ambitious naturalist canvases — In the Studio, The Meeting — before her death from tuberculosis at twenty-five. Her posthumously published Journal made her an international literary celebrity.

Bashkirtseff painted in a refined Bastien-Lepage-influenced naturalist manner with cool tonal palettes, broad square-brush handling, and unposed observation of urban working-class subjects.

Bashkirtseff produced some of the most accomplished women's painting of the 1880s Académie Julian generation and remains an emblematic figure for the history of women's art education in Paris.