Anna Times Two

Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz "Self-Portrait with Apron and Brushes" 1887
National Museum, Krakow

You can sometimes find figurative painter Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz (1857–1893) claimed as Ukranian, sometimes as Polish, and even occasionally as Russian. The reason for this vagueness is probably that Bilińska-Bohdanowicz was born in the Ukraine to a Polish father (I could not discover the nationality of her mother) spent some of her youth in Russia, and then studied art and lived as a young adult in Poland. She also spent a few years in France, where she studied at the Académie Julian. While in Paris she met her future husband, a Polish medical doctor. The couple married in 1892 and then moved to Warsaw. Unfortunately, the artist died a year later, reportedly of a heart attack. 

In comparison with Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-1884) whose almost exact contemporary she was, Bilińska-Bohdanowicz appeared to be a somewhat slower-maturing artist. Although she died in her thirties rather than her twenties as Bashkirtseff did, she left us with much less information about herself and a smaller body of mature work. These two evocative self-portraits, the last one left unfinished by her death, are the pieces she left behind that most clearly hint at her individual genius, and the skill and power she was accruing. 

Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz "Self-Portrait" 1892
National Museum, Warsaw

In the Studio with Palette

Marie Bashkirtseff  "Self Portrait with a Palette"  1880

 Maria Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva, more commonly known as Marie Bashkirtseff, was born in the Ukraine in 1858 but moved to Paris with her mother as a child.. When she died of tuberculosis in 1884 at age 25, she had already made her mark as a painter, sculptor and intellectual, and, after her death, as a writer. A diarist from her early teens, her autobiographical I Am the Most Interesting Book of All, was published posthumously in 1887, was an instant hit, and is still in print today. Her letters to writer Guy Maupassant were published in 1891, also to great acclaim. An early feminist, Bashkirtseff wrote several articles under a nom de plume for Hubertine Auclert's feminist newspaper, La Citoyenne.

Marie Baskirtseff  "in the Studio"  1881  Dnipropetrovsk State Art Museum

The multi-talented Bashkirtseff studied at the the Académie Julian which was one of the few respected art ateliers accepting women students at that time. Men and women studied the same subjects at the Julian but in separate classes, and we can see the women's painting class in the piece above. Bashkirtseff has included a self-portrait (with palette) and possibly also a portrait of the woman she considered her greatest artistic equal/rival Louise Breslau (shown speaking with her.)