The exhibition of the Engels Museum of Local Lore displays a documentary photograph depicting Yakov Yakovlevich Weber with his student Nikolay Vlasovich Kukhovarenko. The teacher and the student sit on a bench talking to each other.

In 1957, after many years of absence, Yakov Weber came to Saratov and Engels in the hope of organizing a solo exhibition entitled “The Volga and its Environs”, which was to become a culmination of decades of his creative work. Unfortunately, the dream of the painter was not destined to come true in his lifetime. The first solo exhibition of the artist was held in the Engels Museum of Local Lore after his death. The staff collected the legacy of Yakov Yakovlevich Weber bit by bit.

The museum’s art collection also contains 13 works by Nikolay Kukhovarenko, a Soviet graphic artist, painter and native resident of Pokrovsk. He was born in 1913 in Pokrovsk (now the city of Engels). Kukhovarenko did not receive a special education in art. He studied under the artist A. I. Smirnov in the art studio at the Engels branch of the Union of Artists. Between 1935 and 1937 he served in the Red Army. From 1937, Nikolay Kukhovarenko was a member of the Union of Soviet Artists of the Republic of Volga Germans, deputy chairman of the Union of Soviet Artists until 1941. During the Great Patriotic War, Nikolay Kukhovarenko served in the 493rd column of the Main Airfield Construction of the NKVD of the USSR and created a series of anti-Hitler posters, distributed in thousands of copies throughout the country. After the war, he worked as an artist in the Saratov branch of the USSR Art Fund.

Nikolay Kukhovarenko corresponded with Yakov Weber for several years — from 1956 until the last days of Weber’s life in February 1958. Subsequently, the correspondence continued with the artist’s son Leonhard Weber. The archive of letters was transferred to the museum shortly before Kukhovarenko’s death in 1997.