Yakov Yakovlevich Weber, Honored Artist of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Volga Germans, a painter, a master of the Volga landscape. More than forty of his pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary paintings have been preserved. Georg Dinges, the Director of the Central Museum of the ASSR NP, and Paul Rau, a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, began to collect paintings by Yakov Weber in 1925. Unfortunately, many of Weber’s works are lost now. During his lifetime the paintings were exhibited in Penza, St. Petersburg, Saratov, Engels, Kazan, and they were also sent to exhibitions abroad (to Italy, Holland, France). Some of the pictures were sold or remained in private collections, and some of them disappeared without a trace. According to contemporaries, more than 180 Weber works were irretrievably lost. Yakov Weber, as a true Russian realist painter, sought the truth in art and life sincerely and tirelessly. He whole heartedly devoted his work to the Volga. In the 1920 — 1930s Weber’s life was connected with Pokrovsk-Engels, the town on the Volga. In 1938, Yakov Weber, as a ‘People’s Enemy’, was persecuted and exiled to Kazakhstan. He spent his last years in the city of Tsivilsk of the Chuvash ASSR.