The Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts houses the painting “Woman in White” by the famous Russian artist Mikhail Fyodorovich Shemyakin.
For a long time, the name of the portrayed woman remained a mystery. In the 1990s, the artist’s son revealed in his letters that the portrait “Woman in White” depicts Anna (Anda) Ivanovna Grzhimali-Egorova, the sister of Mikhail Shemyakin’s wife. She was married to the famous Russian mathematician Dmitry Fyodorovich Egorov. Anna Egorova received an excellent musical education: she studied under the singer Varvara Mikhailovna Zarudnaya at the Moscow Conservatory, sang, and played the piano. She spoke Czech well and translated poems by the Czech poet Jaroslav Vrchlický into Russian. In the 1930s, collections of Czech folk tales, translated by Anna Egorova and illustrated by Mikhail Shemyakin, were published in the USSR.
Mikhail Fyodorovich Shemyakin was born into a merchant family in Moscow. Many of his relatives were artists at heart. His paternal grandfather, the merchant Mikhail Ivanovich Shemyakin, was a self-taught artist. One of his relatives on his mother’s side was Yevgraf Semyonovich Sorokin, the director of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Mikhail Shemyakin also studied there. Initially, his teachers included Yevgraf Semyonovich Sorokin, Abram Efimovich Arkhipov, Sergei Alekseyevich Korovin, Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov, Illarion Mikhailovich Pryanishnikov, and Konstantin Apollonovich Savitsky. By the time of his graduation in 1899, he studied in the workshop of Valentin Alexandrovich Serov and Konstantin Alekseyevich Korovin. In 1901, Mikhail Shemyakin went to Munich where he entered the studio of the famous teacher Anton Ažbe. In 1901–1902, he practiced drawing there. Upon his return to Russia, in 1903–1906 years, he went back to the studio of Korovin and Serov. Following the example of his teachers, Mikhail Shemyakin turned to Impressionism. He devoted all his energy to the art of portrait. He appreciated other people sincerely and strove to find beauty in each of his models.
In 1901, Mikhail Shemyakin married his fellow
student Lyudmila Grzhimali, daughter of the famous Moscow violinist Ivan
Voytekhovich Grzhimali, who headed the violin class at the Moscow Conservatory.
Mikhail Shemyakin became part of a friendly musical family and lived in his
father-in-law’s apartment on the fourth floor of the right wing of the Moscow
Conservatory. In their large hall, the artist painted portraits of many
musicians, both his relatives and their friends who often visited the
hospitable family. He became a “chronicler of musical Moscow” of the first half
of the 20thcentury.
