This painting is an artist’s copy of a portrait from the Gorky House Museum in Moscow. It was painted by Nadezhda Peshkova — a member of the Artists’ Union of the USSR, a portraitist and Maxim Gorky’s daughter-in-law, and Sophia Uranova  — a student of Academician painter Mikhail Nesterov.

Nadezhda Peshkova knew her father-in-law well, and the two had a good relationship. She began to study painting at Gorky’s villa in Italy, where she came with her husband. Sophia Uranova met Gorky in 1933 and later recalled her impressions with ease,

Within the last years of his life, the writer was buried in work and got sick often. So, the artists did not dare to ask him to pose for a portrait. Everything in Gorky’s house on Malaya Nikitskaya Street reminded them of him: the rooms where he lived, the study where he worked, and the writing table where he neatly arranged his things. Peshkova and Uranova abandoned the idea of creating an official portrait of the writer in favor of capturing a moment from his real life, of portraying Gorky at work in his home, “sitting in his study, all alone, pondering over a manuscript.”

The artists truthfully depicted the interior of Gorky’s study and meticulously outlined the objects on his desk. All his pencils are well-sharpened, and the inkwell stands on a saucer: Gorky did not like using any other writing tools. A bookcase can be seen behind him; he began collecting his library back in Nizhny Novgorod and moved some of it to Capri, Sorrento, Petrograd, and Moscow. The literary critic Vasily Desnitsky wrote,