Toilette

In the Paris of the 1880s and 1890s, where Vlaho Bukovac had made his name, one subject sold reliably at every Salon: a woman at her toilette, caught in the private business of dressing and arranging her hair. This canvas is Bukovac's turn at that fashionable theme, worked up in mixed technique on a support a little over a metre tall. Collectors liked these scenes for their air of intimacy, the sense of a room the viewer was not meant to enter, and a painter trained in the academic studios could show off skin, fabric and reflected light all at once. Bukovac knew that market well, and he gave it what it wanted with the polish it expected. The picture later entered the foreign-art holdings of the National Gallery in Sofia.