Marie Bashkirtseff

(1858 - 1884)

Marie Bashkirtseff exhibited paintings at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1880. Five months before dying of tuberculosis, she fretted in her journal about the possibility of being “carried away by some swift disease…If I should not live long enough to win renown, this journal will interest the psychologists; for it is curious, at least—the life of a woman, traced day by day, without affectation.” Her journals were published in 1887, prompting British prime minister William Gladstone to call the author a “true genius.”