Self-portrait with palette

Gażycz executed the work in oil on canvas, employing smooth and blended brushwork in the face that contrasts with more textured handling in the background and dress. Light falls softly from the left, illuminating her face and hand while the dark dress absorbs shadow. The background is muted and atmospheric, rendered in gray-green tones that create a harmonious setting for the figure portrait. The composition is vertical and centered, formal in its presentation, with a signature appearing in the lower left corner. The technique reflects the academic training Gażycz received at the Académie Julian, where she would have studied under established masters in Paris, then the center of the art world. The handling demonstrates particular attention to the rendering of fabrics and textures, from the lace cuffs to the floral upholstery, while maintaining a cohesive tonal unity throughout.

The painting dates to 1896, the year following Gażycz's completion of her studies at the Académie Julian in Paris. It represents a pivotal moment in her career, produced after her training abroad and before the personal tragedies that would reshape her life. Her husband Konstantin Gażycz died in 1900, and her subsequent religious conversion led her to enter the convent of the Sisters of Nazareth in Rome in 1906, taking the name Sister Paula. The work is now in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, though specific details of its acquisition and earlier ownership chain are not recorded in the available sources. The painting's survival and institutional preservation are notable given the destruction that affected many Polish cultural institutions and religious establishments during the twentieth century, including damage to the convent buildings where Gażycz lived during World War II.

Gażycz's path to artistic training exemplifies the challenges faced by Polish women artists in the late nineteenth century. Born into a noble family in the Russian Empire, she began studies at Wojciech Gerson's drawing classes in Warsaw in 1874, and by hats were first presented at an exhibition organized by the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1878. Like other Polish women of her generation, she sought advanced training abroad due to the lack of university-level institutions accepting women in partitioned Poland. At the Académie Julian, she formed a significant friendship with Olga Boznańska, one of the most celebrated Polish painters of the era, and cared for Boznańska after the deaths of her father and fiancé. The two artists spent time together in Normandy. The self-portrait genre held particular significance for women artists as a means of asserting professional identity in a male-dominated field, and Gażycz's inclusion of the palette explicitly claims this traditionally masculine attribute of artistic labor.

Self-portrait with palette stands as a document of the brief but significant period of Gażycz's professional artistic activity before her religious vocation. After 1906, her artistic output shifted dramatically in subject matter toward religious themes and depictions of peasant life, reflecting her new spiritual commitments. Works from her later period, including Peasant Woman and Peasant, adopted a more naturalistic and expressive aesthetic, and several are now in the collection of the Polish Museum of America in Chicago, likely brought by Sisters of Nazareth who established U.S. apostolates in the 1920s and 1930s. More than twenty works from her convent period remain in the properties of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth. The 1896 self-portrait, preserved in the National Museum in Warsaw, thus represents a crucial, increasingly rare artifact of Polish women's participation in the international art world of the late nineteenth century, before the traumas of the twentieth century reshaped both Poland's borders and its cultural heritage.