The characteristic elements of Girl with Chrysanthemums, recurring in the later Parisian paintings of Boznańska, include the frontal posing of the model, the flat character, the creation of the image only with oil paint, without a drawing sketch, the dynamic surface created with thinly laid paint, with short brush strokes, in a similar way in the parts of the face, the dress or the background. The portrait announces the further path Boznańska went on to take in terms of technique, not discounting the changes in style itself. Girl with Chrysanthemums is one of the early works painted not on canvas, but on cardboard, which in time would become the artist’s favourite method.
On its surface, poorly primed with glue (sometimes only in certain parts), Boznańska applied paint dry, in small spots, almost pointillistically, often leaving fragments of the surface exposed. Although less durable than canvas, cardboard, thanks to its porous surface which absorbed the oil binder from the paint, allowed the artist to bring out the richness of the texture and to achieve the effect of a matte surface.
In 1894, the less than 30-year-old artist was already a well-established painter, who for several years had exhibited and collected flattering reviews (which she meticulously collected in the form of press clippings) in Munich, Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw and Kraków. Girl with Chrysanthemums also did not escape the attention of critics, who perceived in it not only a psychological portrait and a colour study, but also content related to the search for symbolism. The Swiss critic William Ritter saw in the portrait of ‘a fair-haired pale girl, with strange and disturbing eyes like drops of ink that seem to pour down a transparent face’ a ‘contemporary ideal of the character created by Maeterlinck’, referring to the drama Pelléas et Mélisande. The heroine of the painting is, in his opinion, ‘a mysterious child, who drives those who look at her too long crazy, six-year-old Mélisande from the aristocratic circles of some present-day metropolis: this is how this girl appears to be, an ominous girl, whose brightness and whiteness cause a shiver.‘
Boznańska herself avoided commenting and theorising about her painting, and when she did talk about it, she tended to cut herself off from distant artistic affinities and emphasised her independence. Ritter’s text published in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, however, was received enthusiastically by her. She wrote in a letter to her father that she had ‘received wonderful criticism’. It is possible that the painting’s mood was influenced by reading Maeterlinck or the text devoted to him published in Świat magazine by Zenon ‘Miriam’ Przesmycki, the brother of Marian Przesmycki, who was friends with the painter during his time in Munich. The description of Malena, one of the heroines of Maeterlinck’s work, ‘frail, slim, anaemic’, in whom there is ‘something intangible, something mysterious, a deeper, inner element, highlighted in the gaze’ seems to be in perfect harmony with the features of the girl portrayed by Boznańska. In Wędrowiec magazine, Edward Trojanowski skilfully linked the melancholic air of her works with Boznańska’s selected colour scheme: