An Unknown Woman: how I discovered a hidden tragedy tied to Russia’s most famous painting

An Unknown Woman: how I discovered a hidden tragedy tied to Russia’s most famous painting It caused a scandal in imperial Russia, then became a staple of popular art in the USSR. But when I spied a copy of Ivan Kramsky’s portrait in the film Sentimental Value, it opened a door to an untold case of life imitating art S entimental Value is one of those films you have to watch very closely. In the Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s latest work , which swept the board at the European film awards and is nominated for eight Baftas and nine Oscars, stories are hidden in closeups, half-tones and peripheral objects. Some of these stories are so well hidden, in fact, that they aren’t even apparent to the people who made the film. In one scene, roughly an hour in, the camera glides down a corridor, and suddenly there she is: a woman’s portrait on the wall. Anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union and later Russia between the 1950s and 2000s, like me, would recognise her instantly. She has been endlessly reproduced: as prints, embroideries, portrait medallions, even on boxes of chocolates. In Britain, people may have encountered her on the covers of various editions of Anna Karenina. Portrait of an Unknown Woman is a painting by Ivan Kramskoy, a celebrated Russian portraitist. Kramskoy began his career as a provincial retoucher before being admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. There, he went on to lead the Revolt of the Fourteen – a protest over the right to choose their subject for the Academy’s gold medal competition. The rebels later became known as the peredvizhniki , or the Wanderers, a group of artists who continued their protest by organising travelling exhibitions across the Russian empire. In 1883, Kramskoy painted Neizvestnaya (the Romanised Russian for Portrait of an Unknown Woman), quietly hoping it would end up with Pavel Tretyakov, the founder of the Tretyakov Gallery – Russia’s leading museum of national art – and the guardian angel of the Wan...