These visits were continued.  October 20th she writes of his increasing feebleness.  She wrote no more, and in eleven days was dead.

In 1885 the works of Marie Bashkirtseff were exhibited.  In the catalogue was printed Francois Coppee’s account of a visit he had made her mother a few months before Marie’s death.  He saw her studio and her works, and wrote, after speaking of the “Meeting,” as follows: 

“At the Exhibition—­Salon—­before this charming picture, the public had with a unanimous voice bestowed the medal on Mlle. B., who had been already ‘mentioned’ the year before.  Why was this verdict not confirmed by the jury?  Because the artist was a foreigner?  Who knows?  Perhaps because of her wealth.  This injustice made her suffer, and she endeavored—­the noble child—­to avenge herself by redoubling her efforts.

“In one hour I saw there twenty canvases commenced; a hundred designs—­drawings, painted studies, the cast of a statue, portraits which suggested to me the name of Frans Hals, scenes made from life in the open streets; notably one large sketch of a landscape—­the October mist on the shore, the trees half stripped, big yellow leaves strewing the ground.  In a word, works in which is incessantly sought, or more often asserts itself, the sentiment of the sincerest and most original art, and of the most personal talent.”

Mathilde Blind, in her “Study of Marie Bashkirtseff,” says:  “Marie loved to recall Balzac’s questionable definition that the genius of observation is almost the whole of human genius.  It was natural it should please her, since it was the most conspicuous of her many gifts.  As we might expect, therefore, she was especially successful as a portrait painter, for she had a knack of catching her sitter’s likeness with the bloom of nature yet fresh upon it.  All her likenesses are singularly individual, and we realize their character at a glance.  Look, for example, at her portrait of a Parisian swell, in irreproachable evening dress and white kid gloves, sucking his silver-headed cane, with a simper that shows all his white teeth; and then at the head and bust of a Spanish convict, painted from life at the prison in Granada.  Compare that embodiment of fashionable vacuity with this face, whose brute-like eyes haunt you with their sadly stunted look.  What observation is shown in the painting of those heavily bulging lips, which express weakness rather than wickedness of disposition—­in those coarse hands engaged in the feminine occupation of knitting a blue and white stocking!”

BAUCK, JEANNA. Born in Stockholm in 1840.  Portrait and landscape painter.  In 1863 she went to Dresden, and studied figure work with Professor Ehrhardt; later she moved to Duesseldorf, where she devoted herself to landscape under Flamm, and in 1866 she settled in Munich, where she has since remained, making long visits to Paris, Venice, and parts of Switzerland.  Her later work is marked by the romantic influence of C. Ludwig, who was for a time her instructor, but she shows unusual breadth and sureness in dealing with difficult subjects, such as dusky forests with dark waters or bare ruins bordered with stiff, ghost-like trees.  Though not without talent and boldness, she lacks a feeling for style.