Anna Golubkina created this work at the start of her professional career. Shown at the World of Art exhibition in Moscow, the sculpture is based on a pious old woman from Zaraisk. The artist spotted saw the woman going to church and asked her to sit for her. The medium of the bust merits separate attention. One early-twentieth-century critic wrote that Golubkina “has endowed wood with the whole of her expressive power, giving it the softness and elasticity of the human body ... Not enjoying the means to work on entire figures and groups, she has focused her attention on the expressiveness of the human face.”