Artifact World Gallery
Get the iOS app

Lady in Blue by Konstantin Somov

Konstantin Somov · 1897-01-01

Konstantin Somov painted Lady in Blue in 1899. The sitter was Elizaveta Martynova, a fellow painter and a student at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. She asked Somov, her close friend and a founding member of the Mir iskusstva movement, to paint her portrait. The work now hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

The deep blue of the skirt is the painting's chromatic anchor. It absorbs the dusk light, framing her pale face and bare shoulders in an almost luminous isolation. Martynova holds a closed book, a signal in Symbolist circles that the sitter was a reader and a thinker, not merely a decorative subject. The dying light breaking through the dark trees behind her rhymes too closely with her expression to be an accident.

Martynova was ill with tuberculosis when she sat for this portrait. She would die of the disease in 1904, just five years after its completion. Somov, who survived the Russian Revolution and eventually emigrated to Paris, never forgot her. The painting remains one of the most psychologically acute portraits of the Russian Silver Age, a period of intense artistic flowering just before the First World War.

A portrait made at the end of something. Not just a day, but a life. Somov gave her the dusk.

Details

Her name was Elizaveta Martynova.
Her name was Elizaveta Martynova.
She asked a friend to paint her portrait.
She asked a friend to paint her portrait.
Look at what she holds.
Look at what she holds.
The deep blue skirt swallows the light.
The deep blue skirt swallows the light.
The pale exposed shoulders emerge from deep blue silk and white lace , the contrast anchors the painting's color drama and signals the subject's social class and period.
The pale exposed shoulders emerge from deep blue silk and white lace , the contrast anchors the painting's color drama and signals the subject's social class and period.
Transcript

Her name was Elizaveta Martynova. She asked a friend to paint her portrait. Look at what she holds. She was a painter too. The deep blue skirt swallows the light. She had tuberculosis. She would die within five years. He painted the dusk at the end of the day.