The Russian Realist painter Lukian Popov created the Woman with a Ring canvas at the beginning of the XX century. The artist painted it in his typical manner: the main emphasis is placed on the face, while the background and the white blouse are made with big sweeping movements of the paintbrush. Popov chose to portray his model half-length in order to lessen the distance between the image and the viewer, and to convey the emotional state of the woman more accurately.

Like many other woman portraits by Popov, the Woman with a Ring depicts his wife Vera Popova (née Kryuchkova), who was a countrywoman.

he painter married her in 1902, immediately after he graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts and returned to Orenburg. Popov’s wife was his model not only for the portraits, but also for some genre paintings, for example, the Meadows flooded and the Groom, where he painted her as a supporting figure.

At the Academy of Arts, Lukian Popov was mentored by the painter Vladimir Makovsky, member of the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions (Peredvizhniki), who helped him master the paintbrush and taught him the ground rules of the realistic genre painting. Makovsky shared Popov’s populist views (Narodnichestvo movement, from the Russian narod – ‘people’, ‘folk’). Makovsky demanded that his students also masterfully worked with the colour, and in the Woman with a Ring it is the colour that determines the composition. The portrait of Popova is painted in gentle mother-of-pearl tones and half-tones, which make the woman’s dark hair and her fair wistful face even more prominent.

Popov began to participate in the Peredvizhniki exhibitions in 1900, and in 1903 he became a full member of the Society. Until his sudden death in 1914, the painted followed the ideology of the Peredvizhniki and was most interested in folk life motifs. He often depicted the most critical social phenomena of his time: from the frustration of the intelligentsia after the Russian Revolution in 1905, reflected in his painting Under the Red Light, to the involuntary resettlement of peasants who had to leave their homes in search of work, illustrated by Popov’s canvas Winter Settlers.