In the summer of 1905, Vrubel seemed close to recovery. His condition had improved so much that he was transferred to the hospital of Dr. Fyodor Usoltsev, a rehabilitation clinic located in Moscow’s Petrovsky Park. His wife and sister rented a cottage nearby and visited him every day. Vrubel felt restored and worked a great deal.

In a short period a summer in Moscow and then in Petersburg, where he settled with his wife who was working at the Mariinsky Theater, and then back in Dr. Usoltsev’s clinic in March 1905 Vrubel was able to create many fine works. This period, before his blindness, lasted less than two years, but it was rich in new discoveries befitting his exalted worldview. For a time, the artist devoted himself entirely to earthly beauty, attempting to achieve harmony with the real, authentic life that he longed for. He linked his creative rebirth to drawing, and suddenly it stood at the foundation of almost all of his works. The artist worked with pencil, charcoal and pastel, often mixing these media and supplementing them with watercolor.

Some works of the summer of 1904 were done with particular inspiration. These include a large, colored drawing, Campanulas. The complex graphic patterns and their special relations capture the powerful life force of stems and buds. The drama of the artist’s study of perfect natural form brings these works close to drawings by the artists of the Renaissance. The same pure reading of form, the attention to its harmonious rhythms, more complex and psychologically nuanced, distinguishes the best portrait drawings of the late 1904-1905 season: his self-portraits, portraits of his wife and portraits of the Usoltsevs (Portrait of the doctor Usoltsev). Vrubel always cared deeply about his relationship to the model he was depicting.

Vrubel’s largest portrait of his wife, After a Concert. By the Fireplace (1905) is essentially a large-scale colored pastel and charcoal drawing on canvas. It was conceived as the apotheosis of a singer, yet Vrubel also wanted to give it a feeling of domestic warmth. The portrait is ceremonious and intimate at once. The singer, resting after a concert, is calm and relaxed. Time flows slowly in this work. The pattern of her luxurious concert dress is carefully considered, as is the relief of the stone wall. The portrait is unfinished, yet despite that it is a success; it already displays power. The artificial essence of drawing is revealed in extremity and becomes an active component of the artistic image. The dress, made from several layers of transparent colored fabric, was designed by Vrubel, like many other of his wife’s dresses and stage costumes. Its sharp, spiky rhythms were borrowed from fragile formations in nature. The dress physically embodies the idea of melting, the idea that led to the concept of the portrait and its light and airy space. Dressed in these layers, Zabela-Vrubel’s figure melts in the warm, dusky light of the living room, in the hot reflections of the coals in the fireplace. The «living relationship with nature,» an organic quality of Vrubel’s works, always helped him renew his artistic devices, refine his technique and avoid clich?s. In his final years, his vision of nature was highly sophisticated.

Vasily Milioti described a real event related to the period of work on this portrait. Crossing the Neva with him in the winter, looking at the folded squares of ice floes taken from the Neva, Vrubel said, «Look… nothing here is invented by man, no matter what might be in nature. Take everything from there.» Somewhat later, he said to Sergei Sudeikin, who visited him in the hospital, «I will teach you to see the imaginary in the real, like a photograph, like Dostoevsky.» The young artists who wrote these memoirs understood that Vrubel’s statements were more than mere words; the entire experience of his work stood behind them.