"[1] She was born 1854 in Zlatopol (formerly a frontier town of the Russian Empire, today a part of Novomyrhorod, Ukraine) as Anna Bilińska, and spent her childhood there with her father, a Polish physician.

[2] The family then moved to Central Russia, where Anna's first art teachers were Ignacy Jasiński and Michał Elwiro Andriolli, both deported by the Tsarist government to Vyatka for their part in the January Uprising of 1863–1864.

[1] In 1877, she became a student of the painter Wojciech Gerson and began to exhibit her work at Warsaw's Zachęta Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts (Polish: Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych).

[1] In early 1882, she accompanied her chronically ill friend Klementyna Krassowska on a journey to Munich, Salzburg, Vienna and northern Italy, before traveling to and settling in Paris, where she studied along with Marie Bashkirtseff and English artist Emmeline Deane at the Académie Julian,[4] and where later she also taught.

After their marriage, they returned to Warsaw, where she intended to open a Parisian-style art school for women, but fell ill with a heart condition and died a year later on 8 April 1893.

This painting (now in the Victoria Art Gallery) evoked such emotional intensity of loss that, when exhibited in Paris and London, it "caused such a stir that it featured in a cartoon in Punch magazine.

Some credit the "prejudices of the time and her own early death and short career" for this lack of recognition,[16] but, if so, it was a fate she held in common with numerous other gifted women painters of the 19th century.

[14] The exhibition's biographical notes provided a timely assessment of her work, proclaiming that Bilińska's paintings had become "part of the canon of Polish art," while simultaneously reflecting that the scholarship on her "entire œuvre and life story" remained, as yet, incomplete.