Jurgis Preiss painted this small portrait of artist Aria Dimze in 1949. At that time, he lived in Tomsk, where he and his wife had been sent after the outbreak of the war. Several times the artist travelled from Siberia to the Latvian city of Dzintari, where he got acquainted with Aria Dimze. Preiss created a lot of her portraits — Aria, Aria at the Piano, Aria in a Coat and others. However, the plein-air sketch Female Portrait became the only image in this series that the artist painted in oil. 

The study was created in a manner that is close to French Impressionism. The artist hinged its colouration on colour gradations, the nuances of light and shadow. On the reverse side, he indicated the exact date the painting was created and the place where he worked on it: 27 / IX 49 Dzintari – 27 September 1949, Dzintari.

Aria Dimze was born in 1919 in the family of Latvian military man Reinholds Berzin. His children — Aria and her younger sister Margarita — bore the last name of their mother, Gildegart Dimze. In 1937, Reinholds Berzin was arrested and shot as an enemy of people. Soon, the matron was sent to a camp near Karaganda. During the war, the Dimze sisters left for Tashkent, then returned to Moscow in the 1950s. Aria Dimze graduated from the textile institute and took up painting. In the 1950s, she worked at the Design Combine of the RSFSR Art Foundation. Margarita Dimze became a puppet-maker. Her most famous works were Christmas ornaments — the bear with an accordion, the bunny with a drum, and others.