Alice Bastide (1868-1959) - Portrait of young girl reading

Alice BASTIDE
(Saint Mandé 1868 - Paris 1959)
Portrait of a little girl reading
Oil on canvas
H. 100 cm; L. 72.5 cm
Signed lower right and dated 1912

The daughter of a Gard-born clergyman and an English woman, Alice Bastide grew up in Paris. A student at the Académie Jullian, she began her apprenticeship under the guidance of Henri Royer and François Schommer. The development of her art focused mainly on still lifes, although she did not totally abandon portraiture and landscape. Her other specialty, for which she received numerous awards, was miniature painting. At the 1914 Salon, she was awarded the Maxime David prize for the best piece, although her finesse had already been noticed by press critics as early as 1907. In 1926, she was crowned with a gold medal at the Salon for her miniature Coquetterie.

In 1896, the young woman married a man from the Gard region, Auguste Massebiaux, whose name she would occasionally bear. Massebiaux, a lawyer at the Paris Court of Appeal, died in 1910. The couple had no children. At the time, she was domiciled at 48 avenue d'Orléans (later named avenue du général Leclerc) in Paris, where she lived until her death in 1959.

Until the mid-1930s, she continued to exhibit at the Salon des Artistes Français with a style very close to Impressionism, luminous and vigorous.

In 1912, two years after the death of her husband, Alice Bastide was certainly still marked by the sadness of her bereavement. The tones of our portrait of a little girl, and the frame she assembles for it, are dark and heavy. The child, wearing an embroidered bonnet, is bent over her reading, her loose hair flowing over a red velvet housedress. This intimate portrait on a dark tapestry background is framed by a neo-Gothic cardboard ornament. The particular and unusual style of this portrait, especially of a child, is entirely consistent with the image, giving the whole an exceptional character.