Portrait of Princess Maria Klavdievna Tenisheva while working

In September 1897 Repin travelled to Talashkino, the estate near Smolensk where Princess Tenisheva had set up craft workshops and a drawing school for village children, and came away satisfied with the work on the walls and with the light in the studio. He had known her working habits for years. From 1894 he supervised the free art studio she ran in her own house in St Petersburg. Tenisheva was a trained enameller who sat at the bench herself, and enamel was the craft the Talashkino workshops did most to revive, which is why he shows her occupied rather than posed. The Russian applied art she was collecting in those same years she later gave to the city of Smolensk.