Self-Portrait with Apron and Brushes

When Anna Bilinska showed this at the Paris Salon of 1887, the surprise was not that a Polish woman had painted it but how she chose to appear. No fine dress, no flattering pose. She stands in a plain work apron with a fistful of brushes, her hair loose and untidy, her palette hanging from one hand, looking straight out with the frankness of someone caught mid-session. Some critics thought the unkempt hair in poor taste. The Salon gave her a gold medal anyway. She had lost her fiance not long before, and painted herself partly in mourning black, setting the figure against a studio backdrop as if to say plainly that the painter and the model here are the same person.