Boyaryshnya-u-okna

Boyaryshnya-u-okna (The Boyar Woman at the Window), dated 1915, belongs to the very latest phase of Makovsky's career — he died in 1915 in a road accident in Saint Petersburg, making this one of his final works. The boyar woman subject had been central to his commercial success since the 1880s, and his return to it at the end of his life reflects both market continuity and personal attachment to a subject he had spent decades developing. The window motif added a contemplative dimension to the conventional half-length costume study, suggesting a figure caught between the interior world of historical Muscovite femininity and the world beyond the window frame — a resonant spatial metaphor for a Russia that was simultaneously defending tradition and undergoing catastrophic change in the first year of the Great War.

Large oil on canvas with the mature handling of Makovsky's final period. The window light provides an opportunity for the kind of atmospheric naturalism he had long favored, while the elaborate historical costume gives full scope to his virtuoso textile rendering.