Varvara Baruzdina

Varvara Matveevna Baruzdina (Krasny Kholm, 1862 – Pushkin, 1941) was a Russian painter of the Belle Époque, active in Saint Petersburg (later Leningrad) and Tsarskoye Selo. She is known mainly for her portraits and genre scenes, and for being the niece and close pupil of the painter Pavel Chistyakov, who gave her her first drawing lessons.

The daughter of a village craftsman, she moved to Saint Petersburg in 1875 to live with her uncle. Five years later she entered the Imperial Academy of Arts, where she became his formal student; she won a silver medal and graduated in 1885. From 1888 she exhibited at the Academy, the Female Art Circle and the Moscow Art Lovers Society. Her painting The Nun was bought by Pavel Tretyakov in 1896, and Separated was shown at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, where, along with other Russian paintings, it was lost for many years.

In the 1920s she settled in Chistyakov's house in the Pushkin district, where she wrote memoirs of his life and gathered students eager to learn his methods. She died in Pushkin during the German invasion and siege of Leningrad, and friends buried her in the garden of the house. Most of her work is held by the Museum of the Academy of Arts and by the Chistyakov House Museum in Pushkin.