Elena Genrikhovna Guro portrayed Mikhail Vasiyievich Matyushin with a violin in his hands for a good reason: from 1882 to 1913, for almost 30 years, he was a violinist in the Court Orchestra.

Working in the orchestra boosted Matyushin’s artistic formation: meetings with famous composers, annual concerts with the best European conductors, and musical innovations — all this influenced the mindset of the composer and researcher, who studied the connection between color and sound. Elena Guro painted a portrait of Mikhail Matyushin in the Impressionist technique.

Guro did not strive to achieve a portrait likeness but rather aimed at rendering the inner tension and creative excitement. The indistinct, almost blurry image of the musician’s face and hands reflects the subtle changes in his facial expressions and gestures and the movements of his hands as he is playing the instrument. Mikhail Matyushin wrote, “Guro and I were Impressionists, but each in our own way. We were guided not by the irrelative beauty of tones and colors, but by life itself, by the movement of everything in sight.”

Guro painted the portrait in 1903 — the year when Mikhail Matyushin started attending the studio of the impressionist painter Yan Frantsevich Tsionglinsky. There, in the studio, the musician and the poetess met for the first time; they got married in 1904 and spent almost 10 years together.

In 1905, Guro and Matyushin left Tsionglinsky’s studio and joined the painting school of Yelizaveta Zvantseva. Its staff included Léon Bakst and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, who never got in the way of Guro and Matyushin honing their skills and trying their hand at anything. The musician and poetess attended the studio for two years and then joined the “Treugolnik” (Triangle) group, which was founded by the amateur painter Nikolay Ivanovich Kulbin.