Zinaida Serebriakova was a Russian painter, born in 1884 on the Neskuchnoye estate and died in Paris in 1967. At twenty-five she sold her self-portrait At the Dressing Table to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the picture most people come looking for. After the revolution she lost her husband and her home, left for Paris in 1924 to earn a living, and never went back.
It shows a young woman at her dressing table, shoulders bare, combing her long dark hair. She smiles. Around her lie scent bottles, powder puffs, a string of pearls and a cushion stuck with bright hat pins.
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She painted it in 1909 at Neskuchnoye, her family's estate, working from a sketch made on a winter morning. In 1910 it hung in an exhibition in Saint Petersburg, and the Tretyakov Gallery bought it. The world that picture came from did not last. Within a decade Neskuchnoye had been plundered and burned, and her husband had died of typhus caught in a Bolshevik prison.
In 1924 she left Russia for Paris, meaning to work there for a while and come home. She did not. Two of her four children stayed behind in the Soviet Union, and she did not see her daughter Tatiana again until 1960.
What You'll Discover
The family she was born into.
Whose wife she became in 1905.
What she painted in a village bathhouse.
What she drew when paint ran out.
Whose help took her to Paris.
Who she saw again, and when.