The merchant’s drawing room has two portraits. They depict the Utkin couple, who were significant historical figures in Tomsk. One of the paintings portrays the artist Antonina Alexandrovna Voronina-Utkina, the wife of the famous Tomsk biologist Leonid Alexandrovich Utkin.

Antonina Voronina-Utkina was born in the city of Veliky Ustyug in 1884. After her graduation from the Stroganov Art School, she was assigned to Tomsk. She worked here as an art teacher in private women’s grammar schools of Natalia Tikhonravova and Olga Mirkovich. Natalia Tikhonravova introduced the artist to the outstanding Russian scientist Grigory Potanin.

Grigory Potanin (1835–1920) took interest in a variety of scientific fields, including geography, geology, ethnography, and botany. He traveled a lot, collecting folklore on the way. The scientist became famous for conducting major expeditions to China and Mongolia between 1876 and 1893. Since 1902, the scientist resided in Tomsk, where he later received the title of Honorary Citizen on the occasion of his 80th birthday. He was also granted this title by Krasnoyarsk and Omsk city administrations.

After seeing the works of Antonina Voronina-Utkina, Grigory Potanin noted her artistic skills and invited her to join his expeditions to Altai and Kazakhstan. There, Voronina-Utkina created numerous ethnographic sketches and watercolor paintings, which are now kept in the Tomsk Regional Art Museum, Museum under the Miklouho-Maclay Institute of Ethnography in St. Petersburg, as well as other Russian collections. She drew shamanic tambourines and costumes, sacrificial places, Altai flowers, as well as various household items used by the locals. Potanin also commissioned the artist to create the so-called ‘Siberian ornament’.

Antonina Voronina-Utkina participated in other expeditions as well. For example, she went on a trip organized by the Academy of Sciences and led by the ethnographer Anton Anokhin, where she met her future husband Leonid Utkin. Subsequently, Voronina-Utkina was always her husband’s faithful companion and assistant whenever he headed his own expeditions. She made drawings for his books on medicinal plants and reproduced his handwritten texts on a typewriter.