In 1896, in an opera in St. Petersburg, Vrubel heard the singer Nadezhda Zabela, he fell in love with the voice immediately. After the performance they got acquainted and, half a year later, married. At the time Vrubel was referred to as the husband of the famous opera singer Nadezhda Zabela. They settled in Moscow, and Nadezhda started to sing in Mamontov’s Private Opera.

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.

Meanwhile, the late portraits took on a special quality as a consciously set task how fully and adequately the artist could capture a person’s image and personality. He used relatively large sheets. His subjects’ head or figure were drawn close-up, in full volume, their position relative to the background was always clearly defined. Nets of hatch marks sit tangent to the form. They create rhythmic structures defined by features of form, and transform color into a tonal solution. The portraits express light on the models’ faces, the texture of their skin, hair and clothing. Vrubel’s arsenal of lines was varied in its configurations in female portraits, from cobwebs on the face to elongated, complex curls of hair, collected in an elaborate hairdo; each of the curls was defined by a separate stroke. Vrubel’s drawing seems to breathe.

In the portraits of his wife, whom Vrubel drew many times, «her captivating, scenic images» gave way to images that are poeticized by meticulously arranged still-lives. In the summer of 1904 he found an echo for her image in the slender birches of Petrovsky Park. He drew the 32 birches (described in a letter to his wife) with all their details, and made from them something like a theatrical backdrop, making them a background for a half-portrait.

The vertically elongated, fragile images Portrait of Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel against the birchs. (1904, State Russian Museum) resembles the ordinary shape of a panel, yet more powerfully emphasizes a departure from the stylization typical of the artist’s decorative works. In this period he attempted to work with his observations of his surroundings, and as precisely as possible, from the landscape to roses on a corsage to his models’ faces. Vrubel worked hard on the portrait and deployed all the materials suitable for paper: watercolor, ink, pencils, charcoal, pastel and chalk. He finished it in Petersburg, uniting the sophisticated coloring elements of pastel and charcoal. The resonant lines of the portrait give the impression that music and the woman were trapped in the birch grove.