A meeting

Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1884, 'A Meeting' is among Bashkirtseff's most celebrated works and a significant document of the naturalist movement in French painting. The composition shows a group of working-class Parisian boys gathered in a street — a subject that placed Bashkirtseff within the tradition of Jules Bastien-Lepage's sympathetic observation of working-class and peasant life while asserting her own ambition to make major social genre painting rather than decorative feminised subjects. Bashkirtseff was acutely aware of the gendered expectations that confined women artists to portraits, flowers, and domestic scenes, and 'A Meeting' represents a deliberate assertion of her right to the grand genre painting of street realism. She observed similar scenes in Paris streets before composing the final work in the studio, combining plein-air observation with academic composition. The painting attracted significant critical attention at the Salon and remains the work most associated with her short but remarkable career.

Bashkirtseff employs the naturalist technique associated with Bastien-Lepage: even, diffuse outdoor light that eliminates strong shadow, a cool silvery palette suited to overcast Parisian daylight, and figures rendered with careful attention to specific social type through clothing and posture. The ground-level cobblestones and background architecture are handled with documentary precision. Individual faces in the boy group are characterised with sufficient distinctiveness to resist the anonymity that lesser naturalists imposed on working-class subjects.