Natalia Goncharova and her partner Mikhail Larionov were leaders of the pre-revolutionary Russian avant-garde. In 1911 they invented a style of painting they called “Rayonism,” which depicted form as the product of rays of light. Goncharova sought inspiration in Russian peasant traditions and folk art and mined these sources with great success, incorporating them into her paintings and stage designs. Her reputation for theatrical design grew while she was working in Paris in 1914, producing costumes and set design for a ballet called Le Coq d’Or (The Golden Rooster) by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. During World War I she was recruited by the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev to produce sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes. In the 1920s she and her husband moved permanently to Paris. With the large untitled work from the collection of The Baltimore Museum of Art, Goncharova returns to the Rayonist style that she had practiced many years earlier. However, the figure’s frontal stance corresponds to the conventions of Russian icons and also to her drawings and watercolors for costume designs. The scale of the work suggests that it was produced in the context of her theatrical work.