 At that time, women were not admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts so, at age fourteen, she enrolled at the drawing school operated by the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, where she studied with Ivan Kramskoi.From 1869 to 1870, she visited France and took private lessons from Charles Joshua Chaplin.From 1870 to 1877, she worked in Chistyakov's studios, then took classes in watercolors and ceramics at the Imperial Society, through 1880, with a break when she and her sister were volunteers in a hospital during the Russo-Turkish War.