黑人女子

Anna Bilińska painted this in Paris in 1884, when she was 27 and studying at the Académie Julian, one of the few art schools that would take women. A Polish painter far from home, she built her reputation on portraits, and this half-length of a Black woman in a white robe and yellow head-scarf was shown in Paris and London before a Polish collector brought it back to Warsaw. It hung in the National Museum there until the war. German forces looted it, and for decades no one knew where it was. It surfaced at a German auction in 2011 and came back to the museum the next year, which is why you can stand in front of it in Warsaw today.