This is a pastel and mixed media piece in the manner of Ilya Sergeevich Glazunov, a Russian painter whose parents died during the siege of Leningrad in World War II. He won the grand prize at an international art competition in 1956 and was given a solo exhibition in Moscow the following year, but caused an uproar with a painting of a nude woman on a bed with her lover staring out a window. The Soviet Academy of Arts would not allow his work to be shown for another seven years. His career went up and down from there. He did portraits for diplomats in Russia and worked as a private teacher. He painted Leonid Brehznev's birthday portrait in 1976 and got exiled to Siberia for refusing to withdraw another painting he did for an upcoming art exhibition in Russia. The painting was large and traced the history of the Bolshevik Revolution to the space age, and the painting offended the bureaucracy, so he was sent to a remote corner of Siberia to paint scenes of workers building a railroad. To survive he illustrated books by authors like Dostoyevsky, and rose to fame again in the Gorbachev era, when Glazunov helped to restore the Kremlin and rebuild a church that had been destroyed during the Stalin era. In 2004 his works were put on permanent display at the Ilya Glazunov Moscow State Picture Gallery opened in Moscow opposite the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. He was the Soviet Union's most popular painter and was internationally known for his portraits of famous people. The piece has Glazunov's name written vertically along the right edge, and it's dated 1992. We consulted with a Russian expert and he said that art dealers in Russia used to put an artist's name on the edge of a painting like this for information purposes, and it is okay to see the artist's name there like that. It is under glass; the overall size is 27 1/8 x 20 1/4 in. wide and the sight size is 24 x 17 1/4 in. wide.