“Sentimental Value” is a film that demands close attention. In Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s latest work—which dominated the European Film Awards and is nominated for eight BAFTAs and nine Oscars—stories are tucked into close-ups, subtle tones, and background details. Some are so well hidden that even the filmmakers themselves may not have noticed them.
About an hour into the film, the camera drifts down a hallway, and suddenly there she is: a portrait of a woman on the wall. Anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union or Russia from the 1950s to the 2000s, like me, would recognize her immediately. Her image has been reproduced countless times—as prints, embroideries, portrait medallions, even on chocolate boxes. In Britain, she might be familiar from various editions of Anna Karenina.
Portrait of an Unknown Woman was painted by Ivan Kramskoy, a celebrated Russian portrait artist. Kramskoy started his career as a provincial retoucher before being admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. There, he led the “Revolt of the Fourteen,” a protest demanding the right to choose their own subjects for the Academy’s gold medal competition. The rebels later became known as the peredvizhniki, or the Wanderers, a group of artists who organized traveling exhibitions across the Russian Empire.
In 1883, Kramskoy painted Neizvestnaya (the Russian title for Portrait of an Unknown Woman), quietly hoping it would be acquired by Pavel Tretyakov, founder of the Tretyakov Gallery—Russia’s premier national art museum—and a patron of the Wanderers. But it wasn’t.
To understand why, you have to see the Unknown Woman through the eyes of her contemporaries. She sits alone in an open carriage against the misty backdrop of St. Petersburg—beautiful, yet with an air of arrogance. For a woman to sit alone was already improper. Her clothing made it worse: a fashionable velvet hat, a coat and muff trimmed with ribbons, gold bracelets. She was dressed in her finest, something a society lady would never do.
Critics called her “a cocotte in a carriage,” “a costly camellia,” and “one of the monstrous offspring of the great metropolis.” Tretyakov, from a conservative merchant background, had little interest in bringing such a “monstrous camellia” into his home.
The painting was later bought by a collector in Kyiv, and then by Pavel Kharitonenko, a Ukrainian sugar magnate. After the revolution, his property was seized by the state. His Moscow home became the British ambassador’s residence—and the Unknown Woman eventually ended up in the Tretyakov Gallery, against both private property rights and Tretyakov’s own wishes.
After World War II, the Soviet state tried to offer some cultural enrichment to a population that had endured immense suffering. With no real art market to speak of, private homes were filled with millions of cheap reproductions in gilded frames. The Unknown Woman became a runaway hit. She was mysterious amid the blunt visual language of Soviet symbols, bourgeois against the backdrop of grim daily life, and even a little sexy in a country whose official culture was strictly prudish. She hung in almost every Soviet apartment.
So when I spotted Kramskoy’s painting in Trier’s film, I was intrigued.I was intrigued and wanted to learn more. What was the significance of the Unknown Woman here? I decided to look into it and sent a message to the film’s production designer, Jørgen Stangebye Larsen. His reply revealed the story of an unknown woman who became known almost instantly.
As it happens, this was not the portrait’s first appearance in Trier’s films. In Oslo, 31 August—Trier’s second film from 2011—the heroin addict Anders returns to his family home at the end of his final day. The house is up for sale. As the camera moves through the rooms, the portrait briefly passes into view, still hanging on the wall.
Fifteen years later, the same wooden house in Oslo returns at the heart of Sentimental Value, home to a troubled family from the early 1900s to the present day. The portrait appears again, this time in a flashback to the 1930s: a young woman comes of age, joins the resistance during the war, is arrested and tortured, and years later ends her own life in that same house.
The portrait in Trier’s film is not one of the many cheap Soviet reproductions, but a free interpretation of Kramskoy’s work, painted by a close friend of Larsen’s stepmother—long before Larsen became one of Trier’s collaborators.
Her name was Hedvig Broch, and this is the story he shared with me about her. Broch had wanted to be an artist since childhood, but her father insisted she pursue a “real” profession, so she went to university instead of art school. After studying sociology, she was admitted to the art academy in Copenhagen—but her husband gave her an ultimatum: her studies or their marriage. She chose her husband.
Larsen told me she later became a very special presence in his life—a trusted adult figure—during his childhood. On Zoom, her daughter, Tiril Broch Aakre, recalled how Larsen used to perform magic tricks for her, while she, in turn, became a confidante for his teenage secrets. Broch and Larsen’s mother also had their own ritual: a Friday book club, just the two of them, sitting together and discussing whatever they were reading. Dostoevsky was among their favorites.
When she turned 50, Broch finally did what she had dreamed of for decades. She left her job and returned to painting in earnest. Russian artists like Kramskoy had long been admired by Norwegian and Finnish painters, and one day Tiril came home to find a striking portrait of a young woman her mother had just finished. “It had, you know, a kind of soulfulness and vulnerability,” she told me. “It just struck me.”
Hedvig’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman is very different from Kramskoy’s. The arrogant demimondaine is transformed into a figure still mysterious, but far more melancholy. The crew’s return to the wooden house in Oslo 15 years later wasn’t the only reason Larsen chose to use the portrait again. Between the two films, Hedvig Broch—like the protagonist of Oslo, 31 August and the mother figure in Sentimental Value—took her own life.
I called Trier and asked him whether this was life imitating art. He told me he knew nothing about the portrait’s history and that its use in the film hadn’t been intentional. Then he quoted a line from Goethe’s Faust to me: man merkt die Absicht und man ist verstimmt (“you discern the intention and the spell is broken”).
Yet memory, unlike art, sometimes endures by intention alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about An Unknown Woman How I Uncovered a Hidden Tragedy Behind Russias Most Famous Painting written in a natural conversational tone
General Beginner Questions
Q What is this book about
A Its a nonfiction investigation that uncovers the reallife story behind the mysterious subject of a famous 19thcentury Russian painting An Unknown Woman by Ivan Kramskoi Its part art history part detective story
Q Wait I know that painting Who is the woman in it
A Thats the central mystery For over a century she was just an anonymous elegant figure This book reveals the authors research into her likely identity and the tragic personal story connected to her
Q Is this a fiction novel or a true story
A Its a true story The author Janice Tomlinson is a researcher who spent years digging through archives letters and historical records to piece together the puzzle
Q Do I need to know about Russian art or history to enjoy it
A Not at all The book explains everything you need to know Its written for anyone curious about a great historical mystery art or fascinating personal stories from the past
About the Investigation Content
Q How did the author even start to solve a mystery thats over 100 years old
A She began with a single clue in an old memoir and then followed a trail of documentsincluding personal letters estate records and official registersoften facing dead ends and surprising twists
Q What kind of tragedy does the book uncover
A Without giving too much away it reveals a story of personal loss social constraints of the era and a series of heartbreaking events in the womans life that were completely unknown to the public who admired her portrait
Q Does the book talk about the painter Ivan Kramskoi too
A Yes significantly It explores Kramskois life his motives for painting her and his role in both capturing her image and perhaps obscuring her true story
Q Are there pictures in the book
A Typically yes Books like this usually include reproductions of the painting photographs of key figures and images of important documents discovered during the research
