Self-Portrait in front of the Easel

In the Paris of the 1880s, a woman who wanted to train as a painter could not simply enrol at the state academy — its life classes were closed to women, and she paid her way through a private studio instead. That makes the plainness of this small self-portrait feel deliberate. Somewhere between 1885 and 1890, Augusta Roszmann showed herself at her own easel, dressed for the studio, brushes in hand, looking back out at the room. The canvas is only about 41 by 33 centimetres, the size a painter keeps for herself rather than sends to the Salon. She held on to it for decades and gave it to the museum in Basel herself, in 1926, when she was in her late sixties.