Boris Kustodiev was a famous Russian painter, graphic artist, stage designer, and magnificent portraitist. His paintings are full of charm, festive mood, and optimism. The artist managed to find his own individual style, which combines the particular aspects of Russian national character with artistic inventions of impressionism and modernism. His works are characterized by images of peasant and merchant life with fairs and folk festivals.
Since his studies at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts, portrait genre occupied a central place in Kustodiev’s work. His first models were friends, schoolmates, teachers, and family members. Since the beginning of the 1900s, Kustodiev was developing a specific portrait genre, the portrait-picture, in which the model blends in with the surrounding landscape or interior background. With much love and tenderness, the artist painted portraits of his children.
Kustodiev’s favorite model was his daughter Irina, whom he painted literally every day. The portrait from the Omsk Museum collection depicts Irina at the age of five. At that time, the artist and his family rented an apartment on the third floor of a revenue house in Kolomna, the historic district of Saint Petersburg. Irina is depicted in a direct and simple way at home, surrounded by familiar objects. Holding a curtain, a curious little girl in a bright dress with flounces observes what is happening outside the window. The work is distinguished by free, bright painting and wide, decorative strokes in the tempera technique.
The daughter of Kustodiev continued to pose a lot for her father as an adult for portraits, huge compositional paintings and book illustrations. She became a theater actress and lived all her life in Leningrad.
The portrait ‘At the window’ was exhibited at the ‘World of Art’ exhibition in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. It was later acquired by the famous Moscow collector Kasyanov. In 1924, the painting was transferred to the Omsk Museum Collection.
