A Meeting

Мітинг

Year1884

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions193 × 177 cm

LocationMusée d'Orsay, Paris

Seven ragged Parisian boys stand conspiring in front of a wooden fence while a girl walks away in the background. Shown at the 1884 Salon and bought for the French state, it is the fullest statement of Bashkirtseva's naturalist interest in the children of the city's poor outskirts.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

About the Artist

Mariia Bashkirtseva

1858–1884

Mariia Bashkirtseva was a painter, sculptor and diarist born in the village of Havrontsi in Ukraine's Poltava region, who became one of the most talked-about young artists of 1880s Paris. Trained at the Académie Julian and shaped by the naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage, she won a Salon gold medal in 1879 and died of tuberculosis at 25. Her early works are today divided between the State Russian Museum and Ukrainian collections in Dnipro and Kharkiv.

View artist profile →

Movement

Realism

Realism is an artistic movement that sought to depict reality as accurately and objectively as possible, holding that the purpose of art is to reflect all aspects of existence, rather than merely its idealized representation. The term was introduced by the French literary critic Jules Champfleury in the 1850s to denote art that opposed Romanticism and Academicism. In the visual arts, the significance of Realism as a style is quite controversial, and its boundaries are undefined. In a narrower sense, realism is understood as positivism, a movement in the visual arts of the second half of the 19th century. One of the first realists was the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who opened his solo exhibition “The Pavilion of Realism” in Paris in 1855. Before him, artists of the Barbizon School—Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Jules Breton—worked in a realistic style. In the 1870s, realism split into two main movements: naturalism and impressionism. In contemporary painting, realism borders on the grotesque and anti-glamour.

Explore movement →

Related Works

1881

In the Studio

Bashkirtseva's best-known canvas records the women's atelier of the Académie Julian in Paris, with students crowded around a boy model in a room hung with drawings. It is both a group portrait of her fellow women artists and a quiet argument that they belonged in professional training, and it now hangs in Ukraine at the Dnipro Art Museum.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

1882

At a Book

A close-focused study of a young woman absorbed in reading, painted in the soft grey-green tonality Bashkirtseva took from Bastien-Lepage. It is one of the few of her canvases preserved in Ukraine, in the collection of the Kharkiv Art Museum.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

1884

Spring

A large decorative panel, begun from studies made in an old orchard, showing a young woman leaning back against a tree with her eyes closed and a faint smile, wrapped in blossoming apple and peach branches. Bashkirtseva described the idea in her diary as a figure dissolved into a tender green landscape, and painted it in the same muted browns and greens Bastien-Lepage used for his plein-air peasants.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

1840

Self-portrait

Taras Shevchenko