The paintings of Ilya Mashkov fascinate with their power, energetic plasticity and color. He was a talented student of artists V.Serov and K.Korovin at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and always had an eccentric personality. He was notorious for being a passionate and adventurous talent who gained life experience ‘on the street’ and in shops, whose ‘universities’ were in European museums. He was suspended from the art school in 1909, but even while a student he became a great teacher himself. His private studio was the most expensive and most visited in Moscow.
Mashkov found his way by joining the artists of the famous Moscow society ‘Jack of Diamonds’. They insisted on the materiality of the world and the subject. Talking about his goals the artist noted: ‘We would like our painting to be powerful and rich in color.’ To create a new art and to bring it down to earth, the artists in this group reconsidered the art of the post-impressionist P. Cezanne and focused on folk art that included personal signage, a tray, and an amateur print. This craft was familiar to the painter since his childhood, and the primitivism of his still-life images and portraits is most genuine.
In the ‘Portrait of the Samoylov Sisters’, the artist, following Cezanne, stylizes the form, emphasizing the main color of objects, and saturating the color. The characters are deliberately hyperbolized. The volumes of their strong figures are outlined in black. The cheeks are reddened, and the eyebrows are outlined following the folkloric ideals of female beauty. The narrow and wide colors and contrasts enhance the decorative effect of the portrait. The frozen poses of the young ladies resemble a provincial photo and evoke the artist’s ironic smile. There is a hidden mind-game present in this painting: Mashkov painted the daughters of his student Anna Samoilova. The girls were from six to eight years old and the painter only imagined what they could become when they grow up.
