Portrait of an Unknown Woman

By 1883 the carriage she rides in was a fairly new sight on the Anichkov Bridge in Saint Petersburg, and so was a woman like this one, dressed at the very top of the season's fashion and looking down at the viewer without introducing herself. Kramskoi never named her, and Russian society of the time could not place her either, which was part of the discomfort. A woman this expensively turned out who was not clearly an aristocrat read, to many contemporaries, as a kept woman or an actress, someone outside the respectable order. That refusal to say who she is has kept people guessing for more than a hundred years, tying her to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, published just a few years earlier. Look at the fur, the velvet, the ostrich feather on the hat. Kramskoi painted each with the same care a portraitist would spend on a face.