The exhibition of the Engels Museum of Local Lore features a sketchbox easel with watercolor and oil paints, which belonged to Yakov Yakovlevich Weber, Honored Art Worker of the Republic of Volga Germans.

The sketchbox easel was presumably acquired by the artist Yakov Weber in the early 20th century during his studies at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. For many years it was carefully kept in the family of Vladimir Leonhardovich Weber, the artist’s grandson, Candidate of Science in Physics and Mathematics, and in 2021 the memorial item was donated to the museum by Vera Gordeevna Khoroshilova, an art historian, researcher and author of monographs devoted to the artist’s work. Today, the sketchbox easel, along with the artist’s paintings, is part of a single gallery of authentic exhibits that form the basis of the museum’s art exhibition.

The sketchbox easel is a dark brown wooden rectangular box with a hinged lid, with compartments of different sizes for art supplies (paints, brushes, pencils) and a sketching area. The inner side of the lid is painted in white. In the lower part of the drawer there are yellow metal extended sliding locks for opening and closing the sketchbook. On both sides of the lower part of the box there are yellow metal plates (overlays). Inside the sketchbox easel on both sides are metal holders for fixing the lid in a given position, and there are rectangular compartments and tubes of watercolor and oil paints (from a later period).

The biography of Yakov Weber fully reflects the fate of all Russian Germans. Repressed in 1937 on a fabricated case and exiled to perform forced-labor — logging — the artist never returned to full-scale work. Many of his paintings were irretrievably lost, and his work was long forgotten and little studied. The first solo exhibition of Yakov Weber took place only after the artist’s death and later became the basis of the permanent exhibition “Yakov Weber. Singer of the Volga”.