enabled her to focus her energies on her career as a painter. The art historian Anne-Marie ten Bokum has conjectured that Bovie was a lesbian. Virginie and Louise had a third sister, Hortence or Hortense, who married François-Joachim-Alexandre Rouen and appears to have outlived him and both her sisters. Upon Bovie's death, the state declined the bequest of her musée and allowed its contents to be auctioned off. A catalogue for the auction, held in February 1889, was compiled by Jules de Brauwere. Work The auction catalogue for the estate lists 170 works of art by Bovie, in addition to 71 she had collected. She is thought to have produced at least 204 works, an unusually high figure for a woman at the time, but as of 2005, only seven could be located. In addition to her grand historical and religious paintings, some of which were official commissions, her diverse oeuvre includes scenes of contemporary life, floral arrangements, and portraits. Unlike the large-scale paintings, the genre works appeal to a bourgeois sensibility and permit a female perspective. In the first decade of the 21st century, The Crucifixion and Descent from the Cross were still on view at the Église Saints-Jean-et-Nicolas at Schaerbeek in Brussels. These early paintings show the influence of Wiertz and masters of the Flemish Baroque such as Rubens and de Crayer. Bovie exhibited The Visitation and The Iconoclasts at the Cathedral of Antwerp at the Antwerp salon of 1861. A reviewer remarked: They show evidence of substantial studies, a good grasp of composition, great feeling for color—all qualities which are grounds for astonishment in a woman and in a century when painting shines with more grace than power. Through her observation of Venetian masterworks, her use of color gained warmth and luminosity. During the last decade of her life, she gradually renounced the academic tradition of painting and her style became freer. Other known works are the Neapolitan Woman with Child (1857), among those inspired by her travels in Italy; L'affranchissement de l'Escaut (1863), a drawing in black chalk (pierre noire) and sanguine that came to auction in Belgium in 2009; and a self portrait (1872). References Selected bibliography P. & V. Berko, "Dictionary of Belgian painters born between 1750 & 1875", Knokke 1981, p. 70. Virginie Bovie in Dictionnaire des femmes belges: XIXe et XXe siècles (Éditions Racine, 2006), with a black-and-while reproduction of her self-portrait