From 1924 to 1926 Petrov-Vodkin lived in France with his family. In 1922 he painted a portrait of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.
During his earlier years, Petrov-Vodkin developed his "spherical perspective": a unique twist that distorted the drawing as to represent the viewer high enough to actually notice the spherical curve of the globe.
He used it extensively through his works like Death of a Commissar and In the Line of Fire, which make the observer seem more distant, but actually close. It is argued that this twist has been built upon Byzantine perspective - an inverted perspective used in iconography.
