Born in Smolensk, Russian Empire

Marie Vassilieff was born Maria Ivanovna Vasilyeva on April 3, 1884, in the city of Smolensk in the Russian Empire. She was the daughter of a provincial governor and grew up in a comfortable, educated household that encouraged her early interest in drawing and painting.

Her formative years in Russia included medical studies and early training at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, but she found the academic environment restrictive. Seeking greater artistic freedom, she left Russia for Paris around 1907, joining the wave of artists who flocked to the city's Montparnasse quarter in the early twentieth century.

This early period set the stage for her transformation from a provincial Russian girl of privileged background into one of the pivotal, if underappreciated, figures of the Parisian avant-garde. Her decision to leave Russia for France was itself notable for a woman of her era, reflecting an independence of spirit that would characterize her entire career.

Her birth in 1884 places her among a generation of women artists — including contemporaries like Sonia Delaunay and Alexandra Exter — who used the relative openness of Paris to escape the constraints placed on women's artistic ambitions in their home countries.