Portrait of an Unknown Woman
Ivan Kramskoi (1837 to 1887) · 1883
A young woman in an open carriage looks down at you with an expression that is hard to name: proud, a little sad, perhaps amused. She wears the height of fashion for eighteen eighty three, a velvet coat trimmed with fur and satin ribbons, a small hat with an ostrich feather, and kid gloves. Behind her the Anichkov Palace on Nevsky Prospekt in Saint Petersburg fades into a misty winter light. Kramskoi never said who she was, and the title he gave the picture, simply Unknown, has kept people guessing for over a century.
The painting is unusually direct for its time. The woman is placed high on the canvas, so that the viewer stands below her on the pavement, and she is lit from the front so that every texture, the velvet, the fur, the glint of gold bracelets, is rendered with a jeweller's precision. Kramskoi was the leader of the Wanderers and better known for his psychological portraits of writers and peasants, and critics at the time were puzzled by this glamorous stranger. Some thought she was a courtesan, others an aristocrat; the writer Tolstoy was said to be uncomfortable with the picture.
Pavel Tretyakov did not buy it, and the painting passed through private collections before entering the gallery in nineteen twenty five. In the twentieth century it became one of the most popular images in Russia, printed on chocolate boxes and postcards and often linked, wrongly but persistently, with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The mystery is the point: Kramskoi painted a modern woman who looks back at the world and refuses to explain herself.
Did You Know? The painting is often called Anna Karenina, although Kramskoi never said so and the novel had already been published when he painted it.
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