The painting “Lady in Blue” by Emil Rau, which is on display at the Alexander Grigoriev Art and History Museum (a branch of the Kozmodemyansk Cultural and Historical Museum Complex), was bought in 1979 from Tatiana Dmitrievna Pokhvalova, a resident of the village of Sumki, Gornomariysky district, Republic of Mari El. This portrait had been brought by a local resident as a trophy from the Great Patriotic War.

Not much is known about the artist. The future genre painter was born in Dresden, Germany, in 1858. He studied at the Dresden Academy of Arts under Leon Pole, a German portraitist and genre painter, and Ferdinand Pauwels, a Belgian history painter.

From 1879, he studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in Munich, first at the school of technical painting of the German artist, Professor Wilhelm von Lindenschmit the Younger, and then with the Hungarian painter Sаndor Wagner.

He painted mostly genre art and lived mainly in Munich, where he worked as an independent artist from 1883.

Emil Rau painted portraits and genre scenes of rural and bourgeois life in Germany. He depicted pastoral landscapes with shepherds and shepherdesses against a background of mountains, as well as ruddy girls and peasant houses. Such scenes were a success with the public at large. Emil Rau’s illustrations were published in youth and family magazines, as well as in the weekly satirical magazine Fliegende Blätter. His works were also published in the German newspaper Gartenlaube and exhibited in the Glass Palace in Munich. The artist’s works are displayed in museums in Germany and the USA.

Emil Rau died in 1937 in the city of Munich.

“Lady in Blue” is painted in full accordance with the traditions of Academic Classicism. Painted against a deep dark background, the piece is a knee-high portrait of a girl in full-face wearing a soft-blue satin dress. Her face is lit up. The master meticulously painted the accessories. On the lady’s chest is a golden necklace. She has her arms folded in front of her with her right hand holding a rose. A light guipure cape hangs down from her elbows.