Zinaida Serebryakova

Zinaida Serebryakova became famous overnight at 25 with a picture of herself brushing her hair. At the Dressing-Table, painted in 1909 at the family country estate, shows her leaning toward the mirror on a bright winter morning, young and happy and completely at ease, and when it was shown in Saint Petersburg critics fell for its lightness and joy.

She came from a family of artists and built a warm, sunlit body of work, portraits of her four children, peasant women in the fields, herself. Then history broke her life in half. Widowed young by the upheavals after the Russian Revolution, she went to Paris in 1924 for a single commission, meaning to return.

The Soviet authorities would not let her back in. She spent the rest of her long life in France, separated for decades from two of her children and her mother, and never stopped painting though the early radiance faded. Only in 1966, an old woman, was she finally allowed a triumphant exhibition back home, a year before she died in Paris.