The son of the Russian ambassador to Rome, Gagarin studied art in Italy. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1832 and then went on diplomatic missions to Munich and Istanbul. He travelled in the Caucasus, then increasingly coming under Russian control. This remote and mountainous region was seldom visited by Western artists in the 19th century, so Gagarin’s drawings made in the 1840s are a valuable record of the traditional costumes of the people of Azerbaijan and Georgia. Although this drawing is carefully annotated with notes on the costume, colouring and other details, it is not reproduced in either of the volumes of coloured lithographs that Gagarin published in Paris between 1845 and 1850, entitled Le Caucase pittoresque, and Scènes, paysages, moeurs et costumes du Caucase.
He depicts here a dancing girl from Shemakha, west of Baku. They were famous for their grace and beauty, and for the sensuality of their dancing. Gagarin uses the French word Bayadère which was applied to Hindu dancing girls, although it was a word ultimately Portuguese and not Hindi in origin. Gagarin may have been influenced by a production of Le dieu et la bayadère, an opera-ballet first performed at the Paris Opéra in 1830. In its depiction of an attractive woman in her dance costume, this watercolour is somewhat reminiscent of the very popular colour lithographs of famous ballet dancers and opera singers on the front covers of sheet music. These were ostensibly sold as music covers in Paris and London in the 1830s, but in fact functioned as a polite form of pin-up.