Niko Pirosmani was born on a farm in Georgia in 1862, but when his parents died, he moved to town and started as a sign painter. In 1910, poet Ilya Zdanevich discovered one of the artist's signs in a pub in Tbilisi and brought some of his works – including "Woman with a Mug of Beer" – to Moscow.
The Russian avant-garde was impressed by the radically modern style of the self-taught artist.