Web Quotableonline.com Frasescelebres.org Greatbookscollection.org

Marie Bashkirtseff (Мария
Константиновна Башкирцева;
November 11, 1858 - October 31,1884) was a
Ukraine|Ukrainian-born Russian diarist, painter
and sculptor.


Born Maria Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva in
Gavrontsy near Poltava, to a wealthy noble family,
she grew up abroad, traveling with her mother
across most of Europe. Educated privately, she
studied painting in France at the Académie Julian
and would go on to produce a remarkable body of
work in her short lifetime, the most famous being
the portrait of Paris slum children titled The
Meeting and In the Studio, (shown here) a portrait
of her fellow artists at work. Unfortunately, a
large number of Bashkirtseff's works were
destroyed by the Nazis during World War II.


From the age of 13, she began keeping a journal,
and it is for this she is most famous. Her
personal account of the struggles of women artists
is documented in her published journals but it is
a revealing story of the bourgeoisie. Titled, I Am
the Most Interesting Book of All, her popular
diary is still in print today. Her letters,
consisting of her correspondence with the writer
Guy de Maupassant, were published in 1891.

Dying of tuberculosis at the age of 25,
Bashkirtseff lived just long enough to become an
intellectual  powerhouse of Paris in the 1880s. A
feminist, in 1881, using the nom de plume "Pauline
Orrel," she wrote several articles for Hubertine
Auclert's feminist newspaper, La Citoyenne. One of
her famous quotes is: Let us love dogs, let us
love only dogs! Men and cats are unworthy
creatures.

She is buried in Cimetière de Passy, Paris,
France. Her monument is a full-sized artist studio
that has been declared a historic monument by the
government of France.

==External link==
*gutenberg author|id=Marie_Bashkirtseff|name=Marie
Bashkirtseff