Pyotr Alexandrovich Nilus was a writer and a painter, working with genre compositions and portraits. He was born in 1869. He studied under the painter Kyriak Kostandi at the Odessa drawing school. In 1910, Nilus wrote about him: “The best landscape painter in Odessa. Kiriak Kostandi is our artistic conscience.”

Nilus was actively promoting the advantages of genre painting, which remained a significant part of Russian art through the 1890s. However, back then, “the social pathos of art, expressed in the work of genre painters of the 1860s, gave way to a much more impartial portrayal of modern life.” The developing trend of genre painting was reflected in the works of Pyotr Nilus, who saw the opportunity to convey the expressiveness of life through everyday motifs and made it his main task in the first decades of his career.

Pyotr Nilus carried on the traditions of Peredvizhniki genre painters, including Vladimir Yegorovich Makovsky, with whom he shared great observation skills, a close interest in everyday life and a talent of noting a specific life situation and expressing it in painting. Like Makovsky, Nilus chose the most mundane and seemingly insignificant events from the variety of themes and subjects of genre painting, painting them to such an extent that they can be perceived as full-fledged novellas, describing the urban life that the artist was part of.

The painting “In the Reading Room” is a perfect example to demonstrate the artist’s subtle talent of painting “mise-en-scene” and using an unpretentious plot to convey the character of an observed life situation and accurately represent its participants. This is primarily achieved through the use of a convincingly life-like composition: the center of the painting shows a figure of an elderly man, immersed in reading, whose image represents a certain social type. The true-to-life impression can be attributed to the confident, somewhat reserved and finished manner of painting.

After leaving Russia in 1917, the artist lived and worked in France.