The Fitzwilliam Museum - University of Cambridge

Frédéric Bazille
(1841–1870)
Black woman with peonies
c. 1870
Watercolour and gouache over
graphite and black chalk on card
335 x 525 mm
PD.1–2004
Bought from the Gow Fund,
with contributions from the
National Art Collections Fund
and the MLA/V&A Purchase
Grant Fund, 2004.
Bazille was born in Montpellier, but moved
to Paris in 1862, initially to study medicine.
At the same time, he began to train as an
artist in the studio of Charles Gleyre
(1808–1874), where he met, and
befriended, Sisley, Monet and Renoir.
Pissarro, who also met him around this
time, considered him to be, 'the most
gifted of all of us'. Bazille exhibited at the
Salon in the late 1860s, painting subjects
from nature and contemporary life, rather
than the historical subject-matter favoured
by the academic art establishment.
This composition relates closely to a
painting of the same title in the Musée
Fabre, Montpellier. It is likely to have
been painted in the first months of 1870,
at which time Bazille had engaged ‘une
négresse superbe’ as a model for three
paintings which preoccupied him at this
time: the Montpellier painting, another
composition on the same theme, now in
the National Gallery of Art, Washington,
and a painting which he planned to
submit to the Salon that year, La Toilette,
also now in the Musée Fabre. Bazille
referred to his two paintings on this
theme simply as ‘les fleurs’; rather like
Manet in his painting L’Olympia (1863,
Musée d’Orsay) he uses the black model
principally as a foil to the exuberance of
the peonies and other flowers. Bazille was
killed in action in the Franco-Prussian
War, aged only 29, and his surviving
œuvre is small. Watercolours and
gouaches by him are particularly rare, and
none of those recorded match this
composition in scale and importance.
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Major Acquisitions