Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya (in Russian: Портрет Вари Адоратской) is a painting created by Nicolai Fechin in the spring of 1914 in Kazan, in the studio of his student Nadezhda Sapozhnikova.

During this time, Fechin, choosing the form of interior portraiture, sought to create a generalized, multifaceted image that would synthesize the model's psychological characteristics with her momentary mood or state.

Fechin presents children in his paintings according to their age characteristics, capturing the plasticity of their movements, the tenderness of not-yet-fully-formed facial features, their liveliness, restlessness, and occasional spoiling.

The painting continues the tradition of children's imagery, part of which includes Lewis Carroll's Alice (1865) and Vera Mamontova in Valentin Serov's The Girl with Peaches (1887), both of which convey "the happy, carefree nature of childhood".

[17] The father of the young model, artist V. V. Adoratsky – an active participant in the revolutionary movement, a member of the RSDLP since 1904, and later a Marxist philosopher and historian – highly appreciated Fechin's paintings and ranked him "no lower than V. Serov".

G. P. Tuluzakova noted in Sapozhnikova’s personality the "contrast inherent in a woman's ability to subtly understand and feel the beautiful and at the same time [possess] a male mind and energetic character".

According to the memories of K. K. Chebotaryov, Fechin did not like to talk much at such meetings but listened attentively to the participants, occasionally inserting short remarks that "aptly and clearly defined his attitude to the subject of the conversation".

This applied to all works in the collection, except for the Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya, which he intended to transfer to the State Tretyakov Gallery in accordance with the wishes of the deceased.

In the portrait of V. Adoratskaya, he liked the simplicity and clarity of the composition, the very “image of a pretty girl”, the still life on the table, and the noble grayish-nacre colors dominating the picture.

Denkov, in an article in 1915, even claimed: “...for the portrait of Varya Adoratskaya undoubtedly served as a model Serov's same V. Mamontova (Girl with Peaches) – fruit on the tablecloth, swarthy face, gray wall, and a piece of window”.

There were a lot of people crowded, everyone wanted to take a closer look at the cuisine of painting and the technique of execution of this marvelous portrait.In the first monograph on the work of Nicolai Fechin, published in 1921 in Kazan, art historian Peter Dulsky wrote about the painting Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya:[27] This very beautiful piece, almost the best of all executed by N. Fechin, depicts a full-length portrait of a girl, composed on the left side of the picture.

The smooth, gray tone of the background serves as a beautiful frame for the portrait, colorful still life, depicting a metal coffee pot,[Notes 1] a vase with oranges and grapes, and a blue porcelain cup, all executed with great taste and skill; the portrait itself is surprisingly soft, with pleasant tones, well in harmony with the whole environment, as a whole giving a slender artistic impression.Art historian Vladimir Voronov wrote about the “purest pearlescent painting, completed realistic form” of the painting.

By “soft, exquisite harmony,” he put the portrait of Varya Adoratskaya on a par with Ilya Repin's Dragonfly and Valentin Serov's Girl with Peaches.

[19] In an earlier essay on Nicolai Fechin's work, dating from 1964, Kaplanova noted the bright and joyful atmosphere of Varya Adoratskaya's portrait.

She noted the brown thoughtful, attentive and clear eyes of the child, a peculiar fit of the flexible figure of the girl “with a wonderful, soft on the lines, neck”.

[29] Ida Hoffman, an art historian, compared the painting Girl with Porcelain (1916) [ru] by Aleksander Golovin and Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya by Nicolai Fechin.

Fechin depicts a conventional, invented situation: a girl sitting on the table amidst a picturesque mess of untidy dishes and scattered fruit.

Things, flowers, books, and pictures on the walls – these bright spots are arranged around her figure in a light-colored dress, creating a peculiar atmosphere of the child's world.

The artist, in his opinion, managed to create a subtle range of colors, dominated by gray-pearl tones, enlivened by bright bursts of blue, yellow, and red spots.

[32][5] The artist and art historian S. N. Voronkov wrote that the composition of the painting is built on contrasts; the harmony and calmness in the image of the girl oppose the chaos of the still life on the table (in his opinion, it could be a reflection on the events taking place in Russia at that time).

[34] The miniature in the dark frame on the wall is a stable color dominant on the vertical axis and a “bridge” between Varya's head and the windowsill, forming a diagonal line.

The color of the portrait is restrained, based on combinations of different shades of white and gray, but the bright and juicy pots of flowers, dishes on the table, and fruit are vividly painted.

[37] In Seryakov's opinion, when using non-finito, the general forms of the image in Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya are clearly “readable”, but upon “detailed examination of the painting, they begin to vibrate and, in some places, disintegrate into a chaotic pile of strokes”.

He believes that Nicolai Fechin's painting is a vivid example of how non-finito, as a hyperbolization of the regular conventions of pictorial language (where there is invariably an artistic selection of the main from the secondary, and the expressiveness of the initial technical element – a colorful stroke – naturally lives in the overall structure of the picture), can manifest itself not only as a direct path to the growth of abstract elements in the work but also as a stylistic approach inherent in a realistic manner of depiction.

[9] According to Tuluzakova, Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya is not a repetition of Valentin Serov's earlier painting, but Fechin's own variation on his predecessor's theme.

[9] Interior details, such as the window with flower pots, miniatures on the wall, dishes, and fruit on the table, carry, according to Tuluzakova, a double meaning.

Rough strokes (which give them a sense of relief and freedom) convey not only the shape of objects but also the material qualities: the silver of a teapot, the transparency of a vase, the texture of fruits.

[6] Art critic and poet Larisa Davtyan wrote that she initially perceived the heroine of the painting as “a huge doll with a very human face,” since the girl sits in full height on the table.

In her opinion, this is not just bad taste, but a dangerous challenge to the sacred representation of “the table as God's throne.” She later realized that this is not a performance of a doll (like Suok from Yury Olesha's The Three Fat Men), because the girl's expression is serious, and she looks uncomfortable on such a podium.

[42] The painting Eya with Cantaloupe (1923; long at the Forrest Fenn Gallery, Santa Fe, USA) is, according to Tuluzakova, a paraphrase of Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya.