Grandduchess Olga Alexandrovna (1882 – 1960), the daughter of Emperor Alexander III and Empress Maria Feodorovna, was a younger sister to the last Romanov Emperor Nicholas II.

As a child, she studied in the Imperial Palace at Gatchina under the guidance of the best artists of the empire, nameley Kirill Vikentievich Lemokh (Moscow, 1841 – 1910), Vladimir Yegorovich Makovsky (Moscow, 1846 – 1920), and Stanislav Yulianovich Zhukovsky (Grodno, 1873 – 1944).  In her youth as married to Prince Peter of Oldenburg (divorced 1916), she patronized Russian watercolorists and the Society of Artists named after Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi (Mariupol, 1841 – 1910), with her teacher, Academician Konstantin Yakovlevich Kryzhitsky (Kyiw,1858 – 1911), as one of its co-founders.

She loved to paint flowers, the celebration of easter, and scenes from “Old imperial Russsia” celebrations of rural life as she knew it, the simplicity and the “happy farmlife” of the native peasants at home