The artist's sister-in-law

Marie Bashkirtseff painted this portrait of her sister-in-law in 1881, when she was twenty-three years old and studying at the Académie Julian in Paris — one of the few institutions in France that admitted women to serious academic art training. Born in Ukraine to a Russian aristocratic family, Bashkirtseff had arrived in Paris determined to become a major artist and kept a detailed journal recording her ambitions, frustrations, and observations that would become famous after her early death from tuberculosis in 1884. The Rijksmuseum work demonstrates the technically accomplished portraiture she was producing by the early 1880s, before the more ambitious social subjects of her final years. Painting a family member gave Bashkirtseff access to a relaxed, sustained sitting that allowed careful psychological observation — the sitter known to her personally rather than professionally. The intimate subject and the institutional quality of the final work together show the seriousness with which Bashkirtseff pursued academic portraiture alongside her more celebrated genre paintings.

Bashkirtseff's academic training at the Académie Julian is evident in her confident tonal modelling and careful observation of the face's planes. She employs a warm palette moderated by the grey-green tones characteristic of fashionable Paris portraiture in the early 1880s. The handling demonstrates the controlled, Salon-oriented technique she was developing under Jules Bastien-Lepage's influence — firm draughtsmanship underpinning fluent brushwork in the flesh passages.