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The following podcast is an analysis of a former Tsarizm article here updated about the creation of the full-size formal portrait of HIH Anastasia Nicholaevna Romanov, Grand Duchess of Russia by Catskill, New York artist, Barbara Korr Green. It had been commissioned by author, J Froebel-Parker. Starting as a skeptic to the claim of alias Evgenia Smetisko (Eugenia Smith) former Newport, Rhode Island resident, Green gradually became a believer as she studied photos of both Romanov and “Smetisko” alone and in 2D and 3D visual face recognition analysis. Drawing on the knowledge of her own family which had escaped the throws of the Bolshevik Revolution while considering other historical cases of survival in defiance of fate and living under assumed identities to avoid death, she understood that “Evgenia’s” claim was plausible and had historical precedent.
The podcast transcript follows, and the audio version can be heard here.
Pip: Froebel Galleries — where the question of who survived what is never quite settled, and the paintings are doing serious historical argument.
Mara: Today we’re following ioannesfrobenius into the world of portraiture, contested identity, and one of history’s most debated survival stories. The territory is Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaevna Romanov — the woman, the mystery, and the artist commissioned to paint her as she never publicly got to be.
Pip: Let’s start with the portrait itself, and the conversation behind it.
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In Defiance Of Fate: Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaevna Romanov
Mara: The central question here is whether a life-size oil portrait of an adult Grand Duchess Anastasia — painted decades after the Romanov execution — can do something history and law never managed: give a woman her rightful recognition.
Pip: The artist is Barbara Korr Green, a Brooklyn-born portraitist whose career runs from Mike Tyson’s training gym in Catskill to Holocaust exhibition work to the Metropolitan Museum’s archives. The commission came from gallery director J. Froebel-Parker, who asked her to paint Anastasia as an adult noblewoman in full Imperial Russian court dress.
Mara: Green didn’t arrive at this project as a true believer. The post includes her interview with Froebel-Parker, and she’s candid about her starting point: “I was more aware of the Ingrid Bergman portrayal in her famous film about the subject not knowing really that there had been other pretenders to the same legacy.”
Pip: So the painter’s journey and the viewer’s journey are the same journey — skepticism first, then the evidence.
Mara: That skepticism extended to the survival question itself. Green describes her initial doubt about anyone escaping the Ipatiev House execution, then frames her shift through her Holocaust research: “During the Holocaust, however, there were people lined up for a firing squad after which a survivor might climb out of the pit alive defying all odds. There is historical precedence for survival in defiance of all probability, in defiance of fate.”
Pip: That’s the title earning its place. Survival against probability isn’t miraculous — it’s documented.
Mara: What moved Green from skepticism to conviction was the visual evidence. The post describes facial recognition overlays comparing the young Anastasia with the woman known as Evgenia Smetisko — photographs from a 1963 Life Magazine spread — alongside 2D and 3D analyses produced with the late Bob Schmitt’s software. Green says the results were, in her word, “compelling.”
Pip: Painting pearls, apparently, was also no small obstacle. Green notes that the most interesting challenge was making Anastasia “accessible to a public who never knew her as an adult, to give her honor, to bring her out of the shadows.”
Mara: The portrait was unveiled April 21, 2018, at a book signing in Albany — tied to the publication of Anastasia Again: The Hidden Mystery of the Romanovs, the precursor to the 2024 book Grand Duchess Anastasia: Still a Mystery?, available through Histria Books. The post itself grew from the original 2018 article written for TSARIZM, updated here as a fuller account of Green’s work and method.
Pip: The book is the argument in prose; the portrait is the argument in paint. Both are asking the same question.
Mara: And Green’s own family history adds another layer — her father’s family were exiled to Siberia during the Bolshevik Revolution, eventually reaching the United States via Harbin, Japan, and Canada. She says she can relate to Evgenia’s account of forced migration “not one of her own volition.”
Pip: Personal history as interpretive lens — that’s what separates a commissioned portrait from a great one.
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Mara: Identity hidden for survival, recognition deferred for decades — the portrait is trying to close that gap.
Pip: History keeps leaving people in the shadows. Next time, we’ll see who else gets brought into the light.
