Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz

In 1887 a Polish woman stood at the Paris Salon and won a medal for a painting of herself, in a plain work apron, brushes in one hand, staring straight out at the viewer. Anna Bilińska had painted herself as exactly what she was, a working professional, at a time when women rarely took prizes there.

She had come to Paris to study at the Académie Julian, one of the few schools that would train women seriously, and she stayed to build a career in a city crowded with ambitious painters. That self-portrait, now in the National Museum in Kraków, carried her name abroad and is why she is remembered as the first internationally recognised Polish woman painter.

Her life was short. Bilińska had a weak heart, worn down further by years of overwork and money worries, and she died in 1893, still in her thirties, not long after marrying and just as she was planning to open her own school of painting for women back in Warsaw.