Vladimir Egorovich Makovsky was a Russian artist, representative and one of the leaders of the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions. He was born in Moscow in 1846. He was a richly gifted person. Makovsky successfully proved himself as a genre painter, portraitist, and landscape painter, and created popular works on gospel themes. He was born in the family of a Moscow amateur artist. His father was one of the founders of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. His two brothers and a sister also became artists. He himself graduated from this school and then, after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts, taught there from 1882 to 1894. In 1894, he settled in St. Petersburg and managed a workshop of genre painting of the Higher Art School at the Academy of Arts.

An excerpt from the book “The History of Russian Art” by Tatyana Valerianovna Ilyina and Maria Sergeyevna Fomina says,

Famous paintings by Vladimir Makovsky include “A Mother’s Visit”, “Don’t Go!”, “Mother and Daughter”, “A Girl with Geese”, and “Two Mothers. Native Mother and Stepmother”.

His contemporaries wrote about the artist,

In the portrait genre, the artist established himself as a subtle psychologist. In 1880, he created a portrait of his wife — Anna Petrovna Gerasimova, a pianist and student of Anton Rubinstein. That work attracts one’s attention with the soft femininity of the created image.

The portrait from the collection of the Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts shows a young man in a dark shirt with a white collar, sitting in an armchair and looking inquisitively at the viewer.