Marianne von Werefkin (born Marianna Vladimirovna Veryovkina; Russian: Мариа́нна Влади́мировна Верёвкина, IPA: [mərʲɪˈanːə vlɐˈdʲimʲɪrəvnə vʲɪˈrʲɵfkʲɪnə]; 10 September [O.S.

He made a career in the Imperial Russian Army, becoming a general and finally commander of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg.

Her mother belonged to an old family of Cossack princes, whose father, Lieutenant general Peter Mikhailovich Daragan (1800–1875), was the governor of Tula from 1850 to 1866, the official palace is where her daughter Marianne was born.

As a teenager, Werefkin had a large studio in the Peter and Paul Fortress and an atelier on her family's summer estate named "Blagodat" (Grace or Blessing) in Lithuania (at that time occupied by Russia).

[citation needed] Werefkin's first artistically important work phase was before 1890 when she made a name for herself in the realistic painting as the "Russian Rembrandt" of the Tsarist Empire.

[citation needed] In Munich, Werefkin rented a comfortable double apartment on the third floor of Giselastrasse 23 in the Schwabing district, which she furnished partly with Empire and Biedermeier style furniture, which she contrasted with folk art furniture made in the workshops of the artist Yelena Polenova (1850-1898) in the artists' colony of Abramtsevo.

[2] In 1897 Werefkin was in Venice with Ažbe, Jawlensky, Dmitry Kardovsky and Igor Grabar, initially to visit a Repin exhibition.

In November 1902 Werefkin began writing her Lettres à un Inconnu (Letters to an Unknown) as a kind of diary, which she finished in 1906.

In terms of iconology and motifs, Werefkin often drew on the works of Edvard Munch, and she brought the aforementioned artists into the picture before her colleagues, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, who took the first steps towards Expressionism.

At that time, the artists Jan Verkade, Hugo Troendle, Hermann Huber and Curt Herrmann frequented Werefkin's salon.

In the winter of the same year, Werefkin, Jawlensky, Adolf Erbslöh and Oscar Wittenstein [de] came up with the idea of founding the N.K.V.M., of which Kandinsky was appointed its first chairman in 1909.

In 1909 the Swiss painter Cuno Amiet, who at the time belonged to the Brücke (Bridge) artists' group, was a guest in Werefkin's salon.

From the beginning of May 1911, Pierre Girieud (1876–1948) lived with Werefkin and Jawlensky on Giselastrasse 23 when he and Marc showed his paintings in an exhibition at the Modern Gallery Heinrich Thannhauser.

In December 1911, Kandinsky left the N.K.V.M., together with Münter and Marc, to present the first exhibition of the editors of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in the winter of 1911/1912.

In the same year, Werefkin intended the final separation from Jawlensky and travelled to Vilnius in Lithuania, where her brother Peter had meanwhile become governor.

In 1919 Werefkin was involved in an exhibition "Painters of Ascona" in the Zürich Kunstsalon Wolfsberg [de] together with Jawlensky, Robert Genin, Arthur Segal and Otto Niemeyer-Holstein.

During this difficult time, Werefkin became friends with the Zürich painter Willy Fries and his wife Katharina, née Righini (1894–1973).

[citation needed] In 1924 Werefkin was a co-founder of the artist group Der Große Bär (The Great Bear, after the constellation Ursa Major) in Ascona together with Walter Helbig, Ernst Frick, Albert Kohler and others.

[citation needed] Frequently, Werefkin earned her living by painting posters and picture postcards or she wrote articles, for example in 1925 for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in which her impressions of a trip to Italy with Ernst Alfred Aye [de] were subsequently printed.

In the last two years before the First World War in Munich, stylistic changes in Werefkin's pictures, which lead to her late work, had already become noticeable, but she continued to develop them in Switzerland.

[citation needed] The typical Russian features in Werefkin's painting, especially in the colouring, which the poet Else Lasker-Schüler had already noticed in Munich, should appear particularly clear in her late work in Ascona.

[citation needed] When Werefkin died in Ascona on 6 February 1938, she was buried in the local cemetery according to the Russian Orthodox rite, with the sympathy of almost the entire population.