(b St Petersburg, 25 Nov 1850; d Moscow, 19 Nov 1898). Painter and designer, sister of (1) Vasily Polenov. She studied drawing with Pavel Chistyakov (1832–1919) from 1859 to 1870, with some breaks. In 1864 she also studied with Ivan Kramskoy at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists (later Arts) in St Petersburg, and from 1869 to 1870 in the studio of Charles Chaplin in Paris. In 1875 Polenova and the famous activist of the women’s movement Nadezhda Stasova (1822–95) organized women’s craft courses in St Petersburg; Polenova was in charge of the arts section. In 1880 she taught in the ceramic studio at the drawing school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. By the 1870s Polenova was working a great deal in watercolour, having spent the summers at the Imochentsy estate in Karelia and at the Ol’shanka estate in Tambov province. Her landscape watercolours, carefully worked up from sketches, clean in colour and lyrical in mood, were shown from 1882 in exhibitions in St Petersburg and Moscow, where they met with public success and were noticed by the critic Vladimir Stasov. In the early 1880s Polenova moved to Moscow, where she associated closely with the family of Savva Mamontov and began to play a prominent role in the activities of the ABRAMTSEVO circle. In 1885 Polenova and Yelizaveta Mamontova organized a carpentry and wood-carving studio at Abramtsevo, for which Polenova made sketches of furniture and carvings in the traditional national style. At the same time she executed designs for embroideries and worked on ceramics and porcelain (originals in Polenovo, V. D. Polenov Estate–Mus., and Abramtsevo, Mus.–Estate). In these designs and also in her illustrations for Russian folk tales (original watercolours in Moscow, Tret’yakov Gal., St Petersburg, Rus. Mus., and elsewhere), she employed a flat, ornamental manner of representation, stylizing motifs from national decorative art. Polenova was closely involved in the development of this national romantic version of Art Nouveau within the Abramtsevo circle. The Russian handicraft section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 was based on drawings by Polenova in this style, with the collaboration of Aleksandr Golovin and Mariya Yakunchikova (1870–1902).

Part of the Polenov family

• Polenova, Yelena (Dmitriyevna)
  • Polenov
  • Russia, §VI, 3: Furniture, c 1800–1917
  • collaboration
    • Golovin, Aleksandr
    • Russia, §VII, 1(i): Pottery, before 1917
  • groups and movements
    • Abramtsevo
    • Mamontov, Savva
  • pupils
    • Yakunchikova , Mariya
  • workshop
    • Russia, §XVI: Art education