The drawing presented in the exhibition of the Boris Kustodiev House Museum is a sketch for the painting “Portrait of Yulia Kustodieva with Her Daughter Irina” (1908), kept in the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery. It depicts the artist’s wife Yulia Yevstafyevna Kustodieva with their children. Boris Kustodiev painted his wife virtually from the first days of their acquaintance. Her portraits created in different years are widely known: there were ones made in 1903 (with a dog), in 1908 (in a light dress and a red shawl), in 1915 (at the window in the artist’s studio “Terem”), and 1920 (in a St. Petersburg apartment, sitting on the sofa).

With love and attention, Kustodiev looks into her face, notices changes, and strives to convey her mood, revealing her character. It does not matter whether Yulia is dressed in a modest dark dress or has a bright red shawl draped over her shoulders, or whether she is on her favorite home sofa or in a bright birch grove, — she is painted by her husband, a talented artist, with great love, feeling and knowledge.

The preserved diaries and letters of Boris and Yulia help to recreate her image — first a young woman in love, then a bride, a young wife, the mother of the artist’s children, a faithful friend and connoisseur of talent, and the keeper of his artistic legacy. The young artist met Yulia Proshinskaya (1880–1942) in the Vysokovo estate, Kostroma Governorate, where she was brought up by the Grek sisters, who were aristocrats. Mutual sympathy turned into love and a desire to be together. On January 8, 1903, their wedding took place in St. Petersburg in the Church of St. Constantine and Helena at the gymnasium of the Imperial Philanthropic Society.

The drawing shows Yulia Kustodieva with her children — Kirill and Irina. She sits on the couch, looking rather sad and holding the baby reaching out to her. Her sadness was caused by a tragedy: the family had just lost a child, baby Igor died from meningitis. Four-year-old Kirill stands behind the back of the sofa. Having tried several times to “weave him into” the final composition, Kustodiev abandoned this idea. In the painting “Portrait of Yulia Kustodieva with Her Daughter Irina” the artist, who had a keen sense of aesthetics, left only mother and daughter, creating not only a double portrait, but a memorial to an event that deeply affected the whole family.