The Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev House Museum presents the study “Asleep. Portrait of Yekaterina Kustodieva” — one of the painter’s earliest works.
The study depicts Yekaterina Mikhailovna Kustodieva (1873–1941), the artist’s sister, who was five years older than him. She graduated from the Astrakhan Women’s Gymnasium. After that, she went to Saint Petersburg, where she enrolled in the pedagogical courses at the Saint Petersburg Women’s Gymnasiums. From 1891 to 1894, the young woman took “a full course of theoretical and practical preparation for the vocation of a home tutor.” During that time, she was also perfecting her drawing and painting skills in the Society for the Encouragement of Arts. Yekaterina sent her drawings home. She was the one who took little Boris to an Itinerant exhibition, which was organized in Astrakhan in 1889, and got him interested in painting. During her visit to Astrakhan, Kustodieva, who was a mathematics teacher in the Mariinskaya Women’s Gymnasium, met Pavel Alekseyevich Vlasov, became a member of his art group and started diligently and successfully honing her painting skills.
The study shows Yekaterina’s room. The young woman has fallen asleep, tired from her studies. Kustodiev seeks not just to portray her but also to reveal her world, her interests, and the things around her. This painting was created by Kustodiev back in Vlasov’s art studio. It provides an insight into what the young artist had already accomplished in his studies. This is a portrait with a straightforward composition, a well-developed perspective, and pronounced coloring, typical for realism paintings of that period. This portrait also greatly resembles the sitter. The collection of the actor Vladimir Rostislavovich Gardin, which is stored in the manuscripts department of the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, has preserved a pencil sketch of this artwork. The horizontal image in graphite pencil shows a sleeping young woman in half length, sitting at the table. She got so engrossed in reading that she fell asleep with her hand under her head. There is a sketch of a boy in a peaked cap on the wall, and a glass with pencils and brushes on the table, showing her penchant for drawing and painting.
The image was created in 1896, most likely from life. The comparative analysis of the study preserved in Astrakhan and the preparatory sketch reveals the way the artist’s “creative laboratory” works, as he changes not only the format of the work but also its composition.
