The Afanasy and Ivan Shustov brothers painted the ‘Mother of God with Child on the Throne’ icon in 1747. The icon was put in the lower tier of the iconostasis of the Trinity Church of the Vlasiyevsky Parish in Yaroslavl. That tier is also known as ‘local’ as mostly images of local saints worshipped only in a particular region are placed there. A Mother of God icon is usually placed to the left of the Holy gate, a double folding door leading to the altar.

The date of the ‘Mother of God with Child’ creation, its authorship and provenance were established by the experts by the matching signature on the ‘Christ Pantocrator on the Throne’ icon which is kept in the Yaroslav Museum of Arts.

Depiction of the Mother of God on the throne with Jesus Christ in her lap began to spread in the Christian art in the early Byzantine period, 4th-7th centuries. The subject began appearing in icons and paintings of the altar part of churches more and more often. In Rus’, the image of the Mother of God sitting on the throne first appeared in the late 11th century when Constantinople masters were painting the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra monastery. Large throne images of the Mother of God with Child were often painted at the Moscow Armoury workshops in the second half of the 17th- early18th century.

The Shustov masters worked in the 1730–1760s and belonged to a famous dynasty of Yaroslavl icon painters. Their creative activity is mostly known by their monumental paintings of the Yaroslavl churches –of Archangel Michael, of St. John Chrysostom in Korovniki, of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and of St. Barbara.