Breton Woman (Version II)

Boznanska painted this in Munich in 1890. She had gone there to study because the academy would not admit women, so she worked in private schools and then in a studio of her own, and she was 25 when she signed this canvas at the lower right, Olga B. 890. The girl wears Breton folk dress, a costume much in demand in painting at the time, but the view behind her through the open window is the German city Boznanska was actually living in. The problems she set herself here were the reflection of the model in the window glass and the light coming across her. The cropped, off-centre framing and the figure perched on a sill come out of the Japanese prints that European painters were studying in those years. The National Museum in Krakow bought the picture in 1961.