Merchant's Wife at Tea

Boris Kustodiev painted this in 1918, the year after the Russian Revolution, when the merchant world it remembers was rapidly disappearing. He grew up in Astrakhan, a trading city on the Volga, and spent his career painting the provincial Russian life he had watched as a child — market fairs, holidays, and the households of merchant families. He trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg under Ilya Repin, the leading Russian realist of the previous generation, and in 1910 joined Mir iskusstva, the 'World of Art' group, which favoured decorative and stylised painting over plain realism. By the time he made this picture he could no longer walk. Tuberculosis of the spine had left him paraplegic in 1916, and he worked from a wheelchair for the last eleven years of his life, remarking that his whole world had become his room. The woman who sat for it was not a merchant's wife at all, but Galina Aderkas, a baroness and medical student who lived in the same Petrograd building. The State Russian Museum, which has held the painting since 1925, describes the world of his late work as 'a magical kingdom of recollections, daydreams and nostalgic visions'.