The Russian itinerant artist Lukian Popov often painted pictures with psychological subjects. In his early work The Grief of late 1890s – early 1900s, he painted two women who experienced a tragedy unknown to the viewer. The younger woman must have recently lost her husband: she is wearing a wedding ring on her left hand, and in the end of the alley one can see graveyard crosses. Her older companion is trying to console her, touching her by the hand in a confiding gesture. The center of composition is a black spot of the mourning dresses, which determines the sorrowful mood of the picture.

In line with many others of his works, Popov intentionally did not fill the background with details of dull autumn landscape and black garments: their dark dull tones determine the mourning mood, however do not distract from the main subject of the painting.

The Popov’s talent to relate stories through a combination of exact details with an ascetic background was highly valued by his contemporaries: in 1899 he was awarded a first prize for his painting Flooded. That work preceded his famous painting The Flooded Meadows, a large-scale picture where consequences of a natural calamity were shown not via the landscape, but via figures of people and separate meticulously drawn details.

Portraits painted by Lukian Popov did not always reflect a dramatic story. Pictures in which the artist painted his peasant wife, Vera Popova (Kryuchkova), are filled with tranquility. They reflected the artist’s vision of women’s virtues: in his pictures A Woman with a Ring or A Portrait of the Wife in a Red Sarafan, the female character is shown wise, quiet and placable.