The 1956 female portrait by the painter Afanasy Osipov features Tasya Alexandrova who was the wife of the Yakut artist Semyon Alexandrov. The artists were connected not only by friendship and common interests, but also by teaching at the Yakut Art School where Afanasy Osipov has worked for a short time after graduating from the Painting Department of the Moscow State Institute named after V.I. Surikov. 

Already at the beginning of his career, portrait and landscape painter Afanasy Osipov created such works as ‘Portrait of M.I. Zhirkov’, ‘Portrait of the poet S.R. Kulachikov-Elley’, and ‘Shaman’s Banishment’. Afanasy Osipov who is a follower of the Russian Realistic School of Painting subtly conveys individual traits in the appearance of the heroine. A strict, slightly tired look and a closed position of the hands reveal the restrained, calm, and reasonable character of the heroine. The woman appears in front of the audience sitting on a chair on a dark umber background dressed in a Burgundy dress, with a shawl thrown over her head. The geometric center of the painting is a round black brooch fixed on the chest and framed in gold-colored metal with a translucent stone in the middle. In all likelihood, the decoration had an important and special function, which was not only decorative and aesthetic in nature, but also acted as a family heirloom. That is why the author depicts it in especially picturesque way. As noted by the art critic I.A. Potapov, the first portraits of Afanasy Osipov were created on the principle of strictly staged portraits: “The faces of the portrayed stand out from the dark background of the canvas, thus dominating the central field. Osipov began in line with this long-standing traditional line, which had a particularly large quantitative weight in the development of the Soviet pictorial portrait of the post-war decade.” This portrait of a woman was exhibited at a zonal exhibition in Irkutsk, which resulted in the admission of Afanasy Osipov to the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1956.