The artistic legacy of Boris Kustodiev includes many images of his relatives and friends. The Kustodiev House Museum presents drawings made in various techniques (graphite pencil, watercolor), and oil-on-canvas portraits of the artist’s uncle Stepan Lukich Nikolsky (1901) and daughter Irina (1926).

In 1905, a preparatory study “Portrait of the Artist’s Family” was made. Compositionally, the center of the work is the table at which the family gathered for a tea party. The table is covered with a white tablecloth. The artist himself and his mother Yekaterina Prokhorovna are depicted sitting on a sofa with a high back. There are two paintings and a round mirror hanging on the wall. To the right of the artist is his wife Yulia Kustodieva, watching their son, two-year-old Kirill, who turned away from adults. A nanny in a white apron carries a newborn Irina in her arms, taking her to some other room. On the left is a married couple — the elder sister of the artist Alexandra Mikhailovna and her husband Vasily Kastalsky. Vasily graduated from the theological seminary in Astrakhan, served as a deacon for several years, and, after moving to St. Petersburg and having resigned his rank, he began working in the State Control, where he received the position of a chief clerk. The well-built man with a beautiful head shape and luxurious curly hair often sat for Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev as a model. His sister Yekaterina and younger brother Mikhail are not depicted on the canvas. Katya, together with her children and her husband, officer Volnitsky, after completing his education at the General Staff Academy, moved to Erivan (Yerevan). Mikhail was in St. Petersburg: at that time, he was a student of the mechanical department of the Technological Institute of Emperor Nicholas I, where he studied from June 1901 to 1906.

The artist did not work out the faces in detail and the figures are rather schematically depicted, but even in this form the study gives the impression of a cohesive, thought-through work. It is a pity that Kustodiev never made it into a complete, full-fledged painting. The preparatory study, which entered the gallery’s funds in 1971 as a gift from the artist’s daughter Irina Kustodieva, was recently restored and reframed.