She was a talented pianist, for which her paternal grandmother, Catherine the Great (1729–1796) admired her, even though she thought that Maria Pavlovna would have been better off had she been born a boy.

Schiller praised her "talents in music and painting and genuine love of reading", while Johann Wolfgang von Goethe hailed her as one of the worthiest women of his time.

[1] Most famously, she held "literary evenings" ("Literarische Abende") where scholars both from and outside of the neighbouring University of Jena were invited to give lectures on various topics.

Several collections of the institution benefitted of her patronage, among them the Grandducal Oriental Coin Cabinet founded in 1840 by the orientalist Johann Gustav Stickel (1805–1896).

In 1850, Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin premiered in Weimar, but her growing deafness prevented the grand duchess from enjoying it.