Mikhail Nesterov was born into a merchant family in Ufa in 1862. In 1874, he failed to enter the Moscow Technical School and enrolled at the Voskresensky Realschule. However, three years later, Konstantin Voskresensky himself advised Nesterov to try and enter the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.
In 1881, Mikhail Nesterov moved to St. Petersburg. There he began studying under Pavel Chistyakov at the Academy of Arts. In 1882, Nesterov decided to drop out of the Academy and return to Moscow. For several years, he honed his skills, studying under Alexei Savrasov and Vladimir Makovsky.
This painting is registered in the museum’s collection as “Russian Matchmaking”. However, the actual title of the painting is “Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich Meeting the Boyar’s Daughter Maria Ilyinichna Miloslavskaya (Choosing a Bride for the Tsar)”.
In this painting, the artist depicted Tsesarevich Alexei Mikhailovich (future Tsar Alexis of Russia). He has arrived to get acquainted with a boyar’s daughter who would become his first wife. It is unknown how exactly this painting came to be created but it is associated with the period of “history genre painting”.
To clarify the attribution of this painting, the staff of the Kyakhta Museum and local historians of one of Ufa schools turned to the writer Valentin Rasputin, a native of the village of Ust-Uda, Irkutsk Region. He was provided with a photo of the painting published in the “Niva” magazine in 1887.
Valentin Rasputin sent a
letter to the school,
