Portrait of a Woman (Gypsy)

Boznańska was 23 when she painted this, and she had never been allowed inside an art academy. The School of Fine Arts in Kraków did not admit women, so she learned drawing at the women's courses run by Adrian Baraniecki, a Kraków doctor who had set them up for that reason. The Munich academy did not admit women either, so from 1886 she paid her way through private studios there instead. This head was painted at home in Kraków and signed on the canvas, Olga Boznańska, Kraków 88. The red cloth slipping from the model's shoulder makes it one of the very few times she worked from a partly undressed sitter, the kind of study those academies kept for their male students. It went on public view the following year at the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Kraków.