Boris Kustodiev is famous for his bright paintings depicting folk festivals and Russian beauties: ‘Pancake Fare Week’, ‘Fair’, ‘Folk Festival on the Volga’, ‘Merchant’s Wife having Tea’, ‘Russian Venus’. However, his paintings also include monochrome psychological portraits, such as ‘Portrait of a Lady in the Interior’.
Portrait of a Lady in the Interior
Creation period
1925
Dimensions
31x27 cm
Technique
Paper, watercolor, graphite pencil
Exhibition
1
Open in app#1
Kustodiev B.M.
Portrait of a Lady in the Interior
#2
#4
A portrait painter
#3
Portrait of F.I. Shalyapin. 1921. Source: wikipedia.org
Kustodiev’s talent as a portrait painter manifested itself in the early 1900’s. Then the young artist was helping his teacher Ilya Repin paint a large-scale painting 'Ceremonial Meeting of the State Council on May 7, 1901’. At that time, he began to develop a special type of that genre — portrait painting, where characters and their environment play equal roles.
#5
The portrait of a children’s writer Elena Vereiskaya is of this type. She is sitting on an exquisite Recamier sofa draped in fabric with an intricate flowery pattern, a still life in a light palette is hanging on the wall.
Kustodiev painted this portrait in 1925 when the first short novel by Vereiskaya, ‘Serezhka in a Village’, was published. The painter was already gravely ill at the time, he could not walk and got to the easel in a wheelchair.
#6
Fedor Shalyapin said about him:
‘In my life I knew many interesting, talented and good people, but if I have ever seen a truly high spirit in a person, that person was Kustodiev’.
#7
Elena was the wife of painter Georgy Vereisky, they were friends with the Kustodiev family. In the same year, 1925 Georgy Vereisky painted the portrait of Boris Kustodiev’s wife Yulia.
#9
Technique
#8
Kustodiev created the portrait of Vereiskaya with a lead pencil. This was an old type of tools — lead wire attached to a wooden stick was used instead of a carbon pencil. This pencil was used in sketches for oil and tempera, as it left I thin inconspicuous trace that was hard to erase.
#10
Kustodiev’s biographer, art expert Vsevolod Voinov wrote: “Kustodiev is starting to prefer to the fortuity of carbon the clarity and distinctness of the lead pencil, allowing to achieve the finest nuances of light and shade “. The artist also used a carbon pencil to draw the dress of the writer.
Coal produced fine shades, and the artist portrayed the reflection of light and shade on the folds of fabric. Kustodiev painted with colored pencils the still life on the wall. He often used a similar combination of tools, for instance he drew the portrait of his daughter, Irina Kustodieva, with lead and colored pencils.
#11
The portrait of Elena Vareiskaya was displayed in the Art Gallery of the Generations Foundation of Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Region since 2001. Ten years later, it was passed to the collection of the Khanty-Mansiisk State Museum of Fine Arts.
#12
State Museum of Fine Arts of Khanty-Mansiysk
read morehide
00:00
00:00
1x
Portrait of a Lady in the Interior
Creation period
1925
Dimensions
31x27 cm
Technique
Paper, watercolor, graphite pencil
Exhibition
1
Point your smartphone camera to open in the appOpen in app
Share
