Portrait of an Unknown Woman

The woman in Ivan Kramskoi's Unknown Woman wears a velvet hat with a long ostrich feather curling from it. Her hat, her leather gloves, and her fur-trimmed coat are all precisely fashionable for Petersburg in 1883. She is riding in an open two-seater carriage, alone. Behind her rises the Alexandrinsky Theatre and the Anichkov Palace. Alexandrinsky Square in the 1880s was a known haunt of the city's high-class prostitutes. That was the first thing contemporaries saw. Later readers connected her to Anna Karenina, whose story Tolstoy had finished six years earlier. Kramskoi never said who she was. He just painted her looking down at us as if she owned the street. Now at Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow @tretyakov_gallery