Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier casts the artist's work against the gilded age of turn-of-the-century Russia, an era when wealth and flashy consumption abounded as revolutionary change was taking place on all levels of society. Painting prominent people of the day in business, government, society, the nobility, and the arts, Serov created a gallery of Russia's important figures -- figures seen with a sharp eye and painted with subtle irony. Yet even when his commissions regularly included such lucrative subjects as the Tsar or captains of industry, Serov's paintings explored a fast-changing society through daring studies of women and probing character studies. Through the early 1900s he continued to learn from and react to the new movements in Western art, developing a distinctive style until his untimely death in 1911.