In the Orangery
Olga Boznańska (1865 to 1940) · 1890
A girl in a pale dress stands among the leaves and pots of a greenhouse, her hands folded, looking out with the wary, self contained expression of someone who would rather not be looked at. The light is grey and diffused, filtered through glass, and the greens of the plants and the greys of the dress melt into one another so that the figure seems to grow out of the background. Only the face, with its dark eyes, is sharply there. Boznańska was twenty five when she painted this in Munich, and it announced her as the finest portrait painter Poland had produced.
Look at the surface, matt and dry, painted in thin layers on unprimed cardboard or canvas with the texture left rough, which was her lifelong method. There is no gloss and no bright colour; everything is a shade of grey, green or dusty pink, and yet the picture is full of light. Boznańska admired Whistler and Velázquez, and like them she painted the air between herself and the sitter. The pose is quiet and the psychology is everything. She said she was interested only in what a face could tell her.
Boznańska lived from 1898 in Paris, where she had a studio full of cats, dying plants and unfinished canvases, and where she painted portraits for fifty years, refusing to change her manner as fashions passed. The museum owns several of her works, and this early picture is the one that shows her gift most freshly. The girl in the greenhouse is unknown; some think she was the daughter of a Munich family who lodged the young painter.
Did You Know? Boznańska kept mice in her Paris studio and fed them at the table; visitors complained that her portraits smelled of the flat.
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