The life of one of the most gifted masters of academic drawing, Alexey Yegorovich Yegorov, was closely associated with the Imperial Academy of Arts. He came there to study painting when he was very young, went to Italy as an Academy pensioner, and when he came back was appointed to the post of an associate professor there. Shortly afterwards he was granted the title of an academician for his sketch of the Entombment composition for the Kazan Cathedral. Contemporaries valued Yegorov for ‘being capable of creating a complex and yet clear and balanced composition with various aptly combined groups of characters consistent with the substance of the picture; the beauty and dignity of form are concordant with the pleasant colours’.
Yegorov’s works include but a few portraits, most of them are on biblical themes. They are easel paintings on Holy Gospel themes: Madonna with Christ and St. John; Christ’s Appearance to Mary Magdalene; Rest on the Flight into Egypt; Torment of the Saviour - the latter became the most famous of them, - and icons for many churches in St. Petersburg. The Apostles was most likely also meant for a church, it could have been painted by Yegorov as a preparatory version for a big canvas. Evidence of that is a special composition typical of monumental painting: large figures of the apostles taking up nearly all the space, neutral background devoid of fine detail.
The Apostles is composed of three parts each of which has an arch. The central arch has Apostles John and Thomas in it, each of the side ones has St. Peter and St. Paul thus repeated twice. Repetition of the characters goes to show that this is a sketch created for separate altar images that often have this type of arch format. The artist must have used a common basis for the different images, and the side parts with St. Peter and St. Paul in them are versions of the same composition. Both apostles are easily recognizable – Peter with a short grey beard and curly hair wearing a blue chiton and yellow cloak, and Paul with dark hair and a long beard wearing a red cloak and green chiton.
The attributes with which Christ’s disciples were usually depicted were equally obligatory — they are a book or a scroll as an image of Christian teaching; later separate emblems for each apostle appeared – for Peter it is the key to Eden delivered to him by the Lord, for Paul it is the sword with which he was decapitated. St. Thomas and St. John are presented as young men with small beards; they are clad in cloaks, long robes and trousers, and aprons. In his hand, John is holding a cup with a lid from under which the head of a snake can be discerned. The emblem is meant to remind us of the legend claiming that the apostle was given a poisoned drink but it did not do him any harm as John had signed the cup with the cross. Thomas, the patron of masons and architects, is depicted with an angle ruler, his hand resting on it.
