The Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin recalled:

Boris Kustodiev was born in Astrakhan on March 7, 1878. His father, a seminary teacher, died when the future artist was a one-year-old baby. All worries about the family fell to his mother. The family rented a small outbuilding in the house of a wealthy merchant. It was then that Kustodiev received his first impressions on the life and characters of provincial merchants.

“The whole way of a rich and abundant merchant life, ” he later wrote himself, “was most evident <…> These were the living characters of Ostrovsky.” (Alexander Ostrovsky was a famous Russian playwright who wrote about the morals and manners of the merchant class).

In 1896, Kustodiev entered the Higher Art School at the Imperial Academy of Arts. He studied first in the workshop of Vasily Savinsky, and from the second year at the workshop of Ilya Repin.

The artist worked almost his entire life in St. Petersburg, but he rarely turned to this city in his work — painting Moscow with its ancient streets. However, he was especially attracted by the villages and towns of the Volga region, where he drew plots for his paintings.

In 1909, the first signs of a spinal cord tumor were found in Kustodiev. Several surgeries brought only temporary relief. He spent several months in Switzerland to be treated in a private clinic in a mountain resort. For the last fifteen years of his life, the artist was confined to a wheelchair. Due to the illness, he was forced to paint while lying down. However, it was during this challenging period of his life that his most vivid, temperamental, cheerful works appeared. The painting “Merchants” Wives on the Volga’ is one of such paintings.