The main exhibition of the Boris Kustodiev House Museum includes several drawings and paintings featuring the artist’s relatives and friends, whom Kustodiev always enjoyed portraying. These works are distinguished by their special attention to detail, good command of drawing, fast, soft line and interesting composition.

The picture shows two women resting on a couch in a room. They are wearing light clothing, appropriate for wearing at home, and both have simple hairstyles. The older woman holds an open fan, not a ceremonial or fancy one, but the kind that was used to overcome the heat and airlessness. The sketch of the domestic scene showing the artist’s mother and one of his sisters was made in Batum (now Batumi).

Kustodiev’s mother, Yekaterina Prokhorovna Kustodieva (maiden name Smirnova), became a widow at the age of 25, with three young children to take care of, expecting a fourth. She devoted a lot of energy and time to her children, for which she was fondly loved by them until her death in 1919. She wrote long and detailed letters to them and helped them in every way she could. She could play several musical instruments, sew, embroider, and fostered a love of the arts in her children.

Yekaterina Mikhailovna Kustodieva, the artist’s sister, was born in Astrakhan on November 17, 1873. She was the second girl in the family after her sister Alexandra (1871). Her father, Mikhail Lukich, was a teacher at the Astrakhan Theological Seminary. Later, two more boys were born into the family, Boris (1878) and Mikhail (1880). Yekaterina Kustodieva graduated from the Astrakhan Women’s Gymnasium and on the basis of her certificate in 1891 entered the Pedagogical Courses of St. Petersburg Female Gymnasiums, where she completed “a full course of theoretical and practical preparation for the title of Domestic Tutor”. Katya studied diligently: her certificates contained “excellent”, “very good”, and “quite good” grades. She is known to have been studying drawing and painting at the School for the Encouragement of Fine Arts and sending home her drawings. After graduating from courses in 1894, the girl returned to Astrakhan, became a teacher of mathematics in the Mariinsky Girls’ Gymnasium, and, like her father, gave lessons part-time.