In his final years, Vrubel had a clear grasp of his mastery of natural forms. The seashell that once served him as an ashtray transformed into «magic,» something he proudly announced to those who came to admire his Pearl (1904). Earlier he had attained a nacreous play of light with the glazes of his beloved majolica. The turquoise waves in his sketch for Thirty-Three Bogatyrs (State Russian Museum, 1901) and the scaly, rainbow-colored plumage of the Six-Winged Seraphim both radiate iridescent light. But in Pearl Vrubel achieved a hard-alloy effect, transmitting all the colors of the rainbow. Like a starry galaxy, the colors of Pearl circle and sparkle. Its captivating depths are built in tufts of black lines that refract and interrupt light. The layer of pastel caresses and rubbings is complicated by the texture of the surface: pieces of paper are glued onto the cardboard base. Figures of nymphs and shifty silhouettes of translucent mollusks are woven into the vortex. This fantasy is finished with a stroke of documentary: a real fly with iridescent wings is glued to the picture’s surface. Soon after completing this work, Vrubel said that drawing was central to the shell, and that it would have been beautiful even without paint. His vision of space and color was so well-defined that he could attempt to communicate the complex modulation of color and depth of the shell, its firmness and shine and sparkle with color, with a single stroke of charcoal.

In his many sketches of the shell, as in the drawings of the campanulas, Vrubel perceived natural form as a microcosm. Judging by the stubbornness with which Vrubel made these drawings, the theme itself enchanted him with its limitless possibilities. In his drawings, the layers of mother-of-pearl came to life, intermingled with each other, and carried the forms away into infinity.

Vrubel’s contemporaries could not separate the artist from his visionary creations. In a letter to Vrubel’s admirer Sergei Yaremich, Alexander Benois summarized his impressions of his encounter with the artist, the state of whose health at that time was «fatally dim»: «He only draws from nature. He has even renounced ornament… He speaks of a wondrous shell that he wants to draw (black and white) in large scale. He wanted to convey the shining of objects rather than their light or color. He describes this with wondrous clarity and conviction. But you can feel the horror of madness beneath it. It is the Demon, the monster that ruined him. Like a moth drawn to the flame».

Sympathy sounds in Benois’ words. But the trust that he summarizes is a truth of life, not of art. Artistic truth outlives the author. The creations of artists have a life of their own. Usoltsev, who observed how stubbornly Vrubel worked until he lost his vision, wrote in a note that appeared immediately after the artist’s death: «…He…He was an artist-creator, with all his existence, to the deepest treasure troves of his psychic personality».