Spring
Весна
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.
Related Works
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.
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.
A Meeting
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.
Self-portrait
Taras Shevchenko