Ivan Kramskoy’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman caused a scandal in imperial Russia before becoming a staple of Soviet popular culture. The painting, completed in 1883, depicts a beautiful woman alone in an open carriage in St Petersburg, dressed in fashionable but ostentatious attire. Contemporary critics labelled her a “cocotte in a carriage” and a “costly camellia”, reflecting the moral outrage of the time.
Kramskoy, a leading figure in the Wanderers movement, had hoped the painting would be acquired by Pavel Tretyakov, founder of the Tretyakov Gallery. However, Tretyakov, from a conservative merchant background, refused to purchase it, reportedly unwilling to display such a “monstrous offspring of the great metropolis”. The work was instead bought by a Kyiv collector and later by Ukrainian sugar magnate Pavel Kharitonenko.
After the Russian Revolution, Kharitonenko’s property was nationalised, and his Moscow house became the British ambassador’s residence. The Unknown Woman eventually entered the Tretyakov Gallery, against Tretyakov’s original wishes. Following the second world war, the Soviet state mass-produced cheap reproductions of the painting, which became ubiquitous in Soviet homes, offering a touch of mystery and bourgeois elegance in an otherwise austere culture.
The painting recently appeared in Joachim Trier’s film Sentimental Value, prompting an investigation into its significance. Production designer Jørgen Stangebye Larsen revealed that the portrait had also featured in Trier’s earlier film Oslo, 31 August, where it hung in a family home about to be sold. In Sentimental Value, the same house becomes the setting for a troubled family drama, linking the painting to themes of loss and hidden stories.
