The exhibition of the Engels Museum of Local Lore presents the minutes of the meeting of the commission for the evaluation of artistic works at the People’s Commissariat of Education of the Republic of Volga Germans. The commission was to approve the sketch for a large commissioned painting “Making Watermelon Honey” by Yakov Yakovlevich Weber under the contract with the Central Museum of the Republic. The official name of the piece was “Making Watermelon Honey in the Collective Farm”.

The composition of the commission was impressive: it included the directors of the Central Museum of the German Republic and the State Academic German Theater, artists, and employees of the editorial staff of the newspaper “Nachrichten”. The meeting involved numerous questions to the artist, to which Yakov Weber, according to the minutes, managed to give exhaustive answers. As a result of the discussion, the commission came to the following conclusion:

Thus, the sketch was approved, and in 1937, the artist completed his colossal work on the painting “Making Watermelon Honey”.

This canvas became one of the last serious artistic works of the master. Weber himself considered the picture unfinished. He recalled, “Here there is not a single person painted from life. I asked the German women in Shcherbakovka to pose for me towards winter, when they had less work to do, but it never came down to it.” In 1937, Yakov Weber was arrested on a fabricated case and sent into exile in Kazakhstan. After several years of exile, the artist lost his eyesight and could no longer paint works of this scale.