It was strange how Mihailov could have discovered just her characteristic beauty.

" One needs to know and love her as I have loved her to discover the very sweetest expression of her soul," Vronsky thought, though it was only from this portrait that he had himself learned this sweetest expression of her soul.

But the expression was so true that he, and others too, fancied they had long known it.

"I have been struggling on for ever so long without doing anything," he said of his own portrait of her, "and he just looked and painted it.

That's where technique comes in.