Porträt der Else Prior Havemann.

Executed in 1940 and titled in German, this portrait of Else Prior Havemann belongs to Malyavin's later career as an émigré, the long period following his departure from Soviet Russia in 1922. After leaving Russia he settled first in Paris and later spent time in other European capitals, working primarily as a portraitist to sustain himself financially. The émigré portrait practice was economically driven but not artistically negligible: Malyavin brought to his European sitters the same directness and confident brushwork he had deployed in Russia, though the flamboyant reds of the peasant canvases gave way to the more restrained palette appropriate to bourgeois portraiture. A 1940 date places this work during the German occupation of France, when life for Russian émigrés in Paris became precarious and many artists produced work under difficult circumstances. The German name of the sitter suggests either a German or Austrian subject or a Germanophone European encountered in Paris émigré circles.

Late Malyavin portraiture shows his academic training reasserting itself within a looser, more personal late style. Faces are rendered with more descriptive care than in the peasant figure works, while costume and background retain his characteristic breadth. The palette would be cooler and more restrained than in the pre-emigration Russian works.