Zinaida Khaminova was born into a wealthy merchant family in Irkutsk. When her father died, her mother Anna Khaminova moved with the children to Moscow. The family settled in the city’s center. In her memoirs, Evgenia Dorogostayskaya, Anna Khaminova’s great-niece, writes that Zinaida was ‘a strong, intelligent, enterprising and well-cultured woman’. At the beginning of the 20th century, Siberian artist Vasily Surikov was a ‘regular guest at Khaminova’s house’.

The artist met the Khaminov family in 1908 in Crimea while on vacation and painted a portrait of Zinaida Khaminova. At that time, she attended pedagogical courses of the Moscow Society of Educators and Teachers. However, her mother wanted her children to opt for a creative career. Dorogostayskaya wrote:

Vasily Surikov preferred to paint portraits of girls with specific facial features. Zinaida Khaminova was the right type: arched eyebrows and lips, wide cheekbones, slightly slanted big eyes and a ‘boot-shaped’ nose, as artist Boris Ioganson used to say. A historian and art critic, Galina Vasilyeva-Shlyapina wrote:

The study was unfinished: Surikov outlined only the details of the girl’s clothes, and left the bottom of the portrait neutral (white) to balance the multicolored upper part. The warm tones of the skin and hair are not lost against the background of the greenish-brown landscape: the artist highlighted them with cold shades of a flower wreath in her hair and blue water.

On his canvas Surikov marked two horizon lines — the high one and the eye-level one. The high horizon line is atypical for portraits of the 19th-20th centuries. Traditionally, in those days, artists placed it approximately in the middle: thus, the viewer was at the same level with the one depicted in the picture. The low horizon highlighted the figure, gave it power, monumentality, greatness. This technique was often used by artists who created ceremonial portraits of most distinguished aristocrats and generals. The high horizon, on the contrary, made the figures less noticeable: as if the painter tried to fit them into the scene. Thus, perception of the Surikov’s canvas changes depending on the distance at which the viewer stands.

According to contemporaries, Surikov was very self-critical. He immediately destroyed the works that he considered unsuccessful. But the portrait from the collection of the Tomsk Museum has been preserved. It suggests that the artist himself highly appreciated it.

In the same year, Vasily Surikov created three more portraits of Zinaida Khaminova. They are housed in museums in Poltava and Cheboksary. The painter gifted the third portrait to the girl.