View from the Studio's Window / Sketch for a Male Portrait – two-sided painting

This double-sided work by Boznańska presents a view from a studio window on one face and a sketch for a male portrait on the reverse, documenting two distinct modes of the artist's practice on a single support. The studio window view repeats a motif Boznańska returned to several times around 1900, suggesting genuine interest in the threshold between the painter's private space and the world beyond. The male portrait sketch on the reverse offers rare insight into her preparatory process for the formal commissions that made her reputation. The work's dual nature makes it particularly valuable as documentation of Boznańska's working methods in her Paris studio.

The window-view side is built with the atmospheric looseness characteristic of Boznańska's more intimate works, grey tonalities dissolving architecture into impression. The sketch side, by nature more provisional, shows her rapid establishment of compositional structure and tonal arrangement before the refinement of the final portrait.