#commission

A Russian businessman ordered this for the staircase of his Moscow house, along with a second panel to hang near it. Supposedly he got nervous about all the bare bodies, pulled out, then changed his mind and took them anyway.

From what I read, the woman sitting here spent decades collecting musical instruments from all over, and thousands of them ended up going to a museum. He was doing a brisk trade in American portraits around this time, presidents included, so from what I can tell this was a commission like any other.

The banking family who commissioned it were, by most accounts, slow to pay and stuck it somewhere out of the way once they had it — supposedly he complained about the whole business in letters for years afterwards. Portraits like this were bread-and-butter money for him while the paintings he actually wanted to make weren't selling.

Made to order for a rich Russian collector's staircase, one of a pair — the other one has people dancing instead. Wikipedia reckons he worked with no sketches at all, straight onto the canvas, moving things around until it looked right.