Konstantin Makovsky was born in Moscow in the family of an art lover and one of the founders of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Egor Makovsky. The artist’s mother Lubov Mollengauer was a talented singer.

Makovsky began to paint under the guidance of his father from the age of four. Later he wrote: ‘For what became of me, I consider myself indebted not to the academy, not to the professors, but exclusively to my father’. At the age of 12, he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he his teachers were Mikhail Scotti and Sergei Zaryanko, concurrently Vasily Tropinin, a family friend, advised him.

After graduating from the school, Makovsky entered the full-scale class of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. In 1863, the artist took part in the ‘revolt of the fourteen’, when he refused to paint his exam picture, which was supposed to be themed on Norse mythology, and left the academy without receiving a diploma. In 1870, he joined the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions.

In the 1880s, Makovsky gained popularity as a painter of fashionable portraits and historical paintings and became one of the highest-paid Russian artists of that time. His portraits were commissioned by representatives of the most distinguished noble families: the Stroganovs, the Yusupovs, the Volkonskys. The artist recalled:

By the beginning of the 20th century, Makovsky had affirmed his status as one of the largest collectors. At first, he collected objects that inspired him as an artist, but later became an expert and specialist in Russian antiquities. In June 1915, Makovsky fell victim to an accident — a tram crashed into his carriage. The artist was buried in the Nikolskoe Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

The painting ‘At the toilet’, presented in the exhibition, was created in 1863. It belongs to the early period of Makovsky’s work, when he painted scenes from the lives of Saint Petersburg dwellers. His works represented the sentimental tradition in Russian genre painting. In such works, he followed the example set by Tropinin, and later established his own version of the traditional genre of depicting ‘heads’ — sketches that combined the features of genre painting and costumed portraits. In them, Makovsky sought to portray an abstract ideal type of people from different social classes.

The painting ‘At the toilet’ embodies the characteristic features of Makovsky’s ‘heads’: it is a portrait of a girl with a pretty, beautifully-shaped face and a thoughtful look in her eyes. The artist used a bright harmonious color scheme and painted the portrait in liberal brush strokes. The lighting is conveyed only conditionally, whereas all the details of the interior additionally reveal the mood of the sitter.