The painting “Makar Yevsevev at Work” was created by the artist Grigory Medvedev in Kazan in 1930. The Mordovian Museum bought this artwork from the painter a year later together with two other pictures. The paintings were transported to Saransk by train.

The Mordovian Museum of Local History was initially known as the Saransk Museum of Native Lands. It was founded in 1918. Its personnel actively filled the collections with items reflecting the traditional life and culture of the Mordovian Mokshas and Erzyas, documents about the history of the region and illustrative materials. While designing the exposition, they even used some artworks, which told about the original culture of native people. For this purpose, the museum officials started to cooperate with professional artists. Thus, Grigory Medvedev was offered to make several paintings of everyday life of Mordovian people. Some of them were painted in Kazan, some of them — when the artist arrived in Saransk, where he lived and worked from 1930 to 1932.

This painting is painted in realistic manner. Medvedev depicted an elderly Erzyan woman in a traditional festive costume. There is a child next to her. The scholar-ethnographer, encyclopedist, and educator of the Erzyan and Mokshan people, Makar Yevseviev, is sitting at the table in front of them. He is making notes of local folklore the woman is sharing with him.

The characters of the painting are in a peasant house. Against the background of the picture, the artist depicted log walls, a red corner (God’s corner) with a carved icon chapel, a small unveiled window, a wooden table with the traditional hospitality attributes, which are a wooden saltshaker and a slice of brown bread. You can also see a spindle next to the woman.

The artist Grigory Medvedev knew Makar Yevseviev personally:

Yevseviev mentioned in his letters to his nephew. In the 1920s–1930s, the house of the ethnographer gathered the representatives of creative intelligensia, young educators of the Volga region, who were fascinated by the ideas of their ethnic statehood and autonomy. They analyzed appearance of their own scientific and cultural institutions in these areas, as well as emergence of professional visual arts of the Chuvash, Mari, and Mordva.

At the same time the question of the creation of Mordovian ethnic autonomy arose. The formation of the Mordovian district in the Middle Volga in 1928 became the first step to it.