Russian émigrée Marevna settled in Paris in 1912 amid the artistic community of La Ruche, where her circle included Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine; she exhibited at The Tuileries in 1912. In 1915 she met the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, with whom she had a daughter, Marika, and under his influence, embraced cubism. In 1921 she settled in England with Marika and later in life made many portraits from memory of the Parisian circle of her youth.