The cityscapes of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky are precise and detailed, depicting ordinary subjects. The artist took an interest in regional history, ethnography, and architecture. He paid close attention to every building and strove to understand its story which reflected the personality of its residents. The exhibition of the Voronezh Art Museum houses a watercolor of the “Provincial Town” series which depicts a corner of old Voronezh.

In this painting, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky depicted the Ilyinskaya Church in Voronezh, also known as the Church of Elijah the Prophet. The stone church was first mentioned in the municipal register in 1615. In just one century, the church changed two names — the Trinity Church and the Church of the Entry into Jerusalem — and suffered significant damage in a fire. In 1767–1771, with the blessing of Saint Tikhon, a new stone church was built. Nowadays, its walls are covered with red plaster. The street depicted in this painting is Ilyinsky Syezd. Nowadays, it is known as Sevastyanovsky Syezd, and is a site of archeological excavations.

Mstislav Dobuzhinsky was a Russian and Lithuanian painter, a master of the cityscape, an illustrator, and a member of the group “Mir Iskusstva” (World of Art). He was born in Novgorod, and his ancestors owned the Dobuzhi estate in Lithuania. His parents, a lieutenant general and an opera singer, divorced when he was still a child, and the boy split time between two homes. He studied in various cities, was forced to move houses a lot, and focused his attention on painting. He reminisced,

At the age of nine, Dobuzhinsky enrolled at the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in Saint Petersburg. Later he studied at private painting schools and abroad. Having returned to Saint Petersburg, the artist initially drew caricatures for magazines and later became close with the social circle of Sergei Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois. He created illustrations for the books by Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Bunin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Lermontov, and Hans Christian Andersen.

Mstislav Dobuzhinsky participated in numerous exhibitions, studied the theory of painting, taught at private art schools, and became a professor at the Academy of Arts. He created a lot of paintings in Saint Petersburg and enjoyed depicting the city with its backstreets, well courtyards, and bridges. Nowadays, his paintings are housed by the museums of various countries, including Russia, England, France, and the United States.