Ljubov Sergeyevna Popova was born in Ivanovskoye near Moscow on 24 April 1889 as the daughter of a wealthy textile merchant. Around 1907 she began to study in Moscow in the private studio of Zunkovski, the Impressionist painter. From 1909 to 1911 she went on serveral journeys through Russia, as well as to Italy. After Popova had seen paintings by Picasso and Braque at the Shtshukin collection, she visited Paris for the first time in 1912 in order to study Cubism at the Acedémie La Palette. When World War I broke out, she worked once again in Moscow, at Tatlin's studio. In 1918 she became a teacher at SWOMAS and married Boris von Eding, the art historian, who became a victim of typhoid fever already one year later. On 15 May 1924 Popova died of scarlet fever, of which her small son had also died a little earlier.