A young girl is garbed in Bosnian ethnic dress. She is wearing a pillbox hat on her head, a bandana around her neck, and a vest over her white shirt. This profile portrait is a powerful painting in a collection of scenes from Sarajevo, where Ivana Kobilca used a brighter palette of shades and, just as during her studies in Paris, also used visible brush strokes as a means of expression. She again depicted a girl in profile in her monumental allegoric painting
Slovenia Bows to Ljubljana (
Slovenija se klanja Ljubljani) for the Ljubljana Town Hall.
Ivana Kobilca had several female students in Sarajevo who experimented with plein air techniques; her landscape paintings cannot be definitively identified, so we accordingly seek the echoes of her plein air–impressionist harmony in her figural scenes. Among the illuminated portraits from the same period, there are Rita Passini and Julija Bussjäger, but the strongest parallel alongside the Bosnian Girl is seen in both versions of the The Goose Herder (Gosja Pastirica), where Ivana Kobilca juxtaposed a classic studio figure against an “impressionist” background.