In almost every book of early twentieth-century photographs of Armenians, her face appears. This woman appears at once familiar and anonymous. She has been variously described as an “Armenian woman of Tiflis,” an “Armenian woman from Baku,” and at other times an “Armenian woman of Shamakhi.” Her name was Marali Bek-Marmarchev.

Marali Bek-Marmarchev, also known as Marmarcheva or in some westernized forms Marmarian, was born around 1870 into an important Armenian family in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia). Although originally from Tiflis, the Bek-Marmarchev family would, over time, become closely connected to the northern regions of the Russian Empire, particularly Finland and Estonia, where they served as representatives of a small Armenian diaspora.

The artistic life of Marali Bek-Marmarchev can be divided into two main periods. The first concerns her youth in the Caucasus, where she began her career as a photographic model. The second, far better documented, took place in Estonia, where she transitioned into a career as a portrait painter. This article focuses on her forgotten early period as a model, in order to restore a name to a widely circulated yet unidentified face.

Marali Bek-Marmarchev’s legacy is paradoxical. To this day, no definitive connection has yet been established between the widely recognized yet unidentified face seen in late nineteenth-century Caucasian photographs and the painter who emerged during the final years of Imperial Russia. Before settling in what is now Estonia around 1912, she was one of the most sought-after photographic models in the Caucasus, to the extent that her images appear frequently in pre World War I books on Armenians and continue to circulate widely online. Yet her name is rarely associated with the photographs in which she appears.

Contrary to popular belief, Marali Bek-Marmarchev was not a local Armenian woman selected from within Armenian communities for ethnographic documentation. Her case illustrates a broader point: many early photographs of Armenians, as well as of other peoples, were not straightforward representations of social reality but staged constructions. Until roughly the 1930s, photographers were primarily artists. Every detail was carefully composed, much like in painting. The subject functioned primarily as a model, and costumes were not necessarily those of the sitter, but rather those provided by the photographer.

Photographic studios maintained extensive wardrobes of garments used to dress their models. Rather than reflecting the lived reality of Armenian clothing, these images reveal how Armenianness(es) was visually constructed and perceived. After being photographed numerous times—each image associated with a different city of the Caucasus—Marali Bek-Marmarchev eventually became a recognized portrait painter herself after settling in Tallinn, effectively reversing the roles she had once occupied.

Curiously, after her relocation to Estonia, she became a painter whose reputation extended throughout the Russian Empire. She is particularly known for her 1912 portrait of Tsarevich Alexei in the uniform of the 5th Alexandria Hussar Regiment, which she presented to Tsarina Alexandra. Members of her family—such as her brother Mikhaïl (1855–1924), known for inventing folding skis—were also accustomed to moving within imperial court circles and maintaining close ties with the Russian aristocracy.

Throughout her career, Marali Bek-Marmarchev was associated with some of the leading Russian artists of her time, including her friend, the painter Ilya Repin (1844–1930), one of the leading figures of Russian Realism. During her early photographic career, she worked with some of the most important photographers of the Caucasus, including the Armenian-Persian Antoine Sevruguin (1851–1933), who photographed her as an “Armenian woman from Persia,” and the well-known Italo-Russian photographer Dmitri Yermakov (1845–1916), who presented her as the “Lady of Tiflis.”

Her trajectory from photographic model to painter thus reflects how late nineteenth-century Caucasian photography produced enduring visual identities that often outlived the names of those who appeared in them.