Portrait Sketch of a Young Girl – two-sided painting

The portrait sketch of a young girl on the reverse of the 1894 Czajkowski portrait reveals Boznańska in direct observational mode, capturing a subject with rapid economy. Young and adolescent female subjects appear across her career — she was particularly attuned to the transitional quality of childhood on the threshold of adulthood, the social performance of femininity not yet fully assumed. This sketch quality work demonstrates that her celebrated atmospheric diffusion was not merely a stylistic mannerism but the natural product of rapid, sensitive observation — her "finished" paintings represent a refinement of exactly this kind of alert, empathetic looking. The dual use of the canvas support connects this study to Boznańska's broader practice of treating all mark-making as part of an ongoing conversation with her subjects rather than as performance for a public audience. Its survival in the National Museum in Kraków speaks to the value placed on her working process.

As a sketch on the reverse of a worked canvas, the handling is necessarily more spontaneous than Boznańska's finished portraits — gestural marks establishing the face's structure and expression without the layered atmospheric build-up of her mature technique.