Profile of a young woman

Profile of a Young Woman from 1900, now in the National Museum in Warsaw, employs the strict profile view that several European Post-Impressionist painters favoured in the years around 1900, when the format's associations with classical antiquity and medieval portraiture gave it a quality of timeless formality well suited to the Synthétist desire for simplified, iconic form. Gauguin had used the profile extensively in his Tahitian paintings, and Ślewiński's adoption of the format in Brittany connects this work to the broader Post-Aven tradition while applying it to a European model in a Northern European context.

The profile format gives Ślewiński a clear, unambiguous silhouette to work from — the contour of forehead, nose, lips, and chin defining the face's essential character without the complications of a three-quarter or frontal view. The background is kept simple to maximise the clarity of the profile's outline against it.