Ritratto di Zinaida Jusupova

Serov had a low opinion of the rich people who lined up to have him paint them. He found most of them vain and said so. Princess Zinaida Yusupova he made an exception for. She was among the wealthiest women in Russia, but he liked her warmth and her real feeling for art, and he took his time, reportedly around 80 sittings for this one portrait. He shows her at ease on a sofa with her little dog, in a room hung with pictures, the whole thing light and unforced. This was 1902, in the last calm years of the old order. Her son Felix, then a boy, would help murder Rasputin 14 years later.