SERF ARTISTS. Nikolai Argunov: Portrait of Praskovya Sheremeteva (1802). At the time of this portrait the serf singer's marriage to Count Sheremetev (whose image is depicted in the miniature) was concealed from the public and the court. Argunov was the first Russian artist of serf origin to be elected to the Imperial icademy of Arts.
<p>IMAGES OF DOMESTICITY.</p>Left: Vasily Tropinin: Portrait of Pushkin (1827). Wearing a khalat, the writer is portrayed as a European gentleman yet perfectly at ease with the customs of his native land.
Below: Alexei Venetsianov: Morning of the Lady of the Manor (1823), a picture of what Herzen called the 'feudal bond of affection' between the noble family and its household serfs.
RUSSIAN PASTORAL. Above: Venetsianov: In the Ploughed Field: Spring
1827), an idealized depiction of the female agricultural labourer in traditional Russian dress. Below: Vasily Perov: Hunters at Rest (1871). Like Turgenev, Perov portrays hunting as a recreation that brought the social classes together. Here the squire (left) and the peasant (right) share their food and drink.
MOSCOW RETROSPECT. Above: The Kremlin's Terem Palace
restored in the1850sby Fedor Solntsev in the seventeenth-century Muscovite
style, complete with tiled ovens and kokoshnik-shapedarches. Below: Vasily
Surikov: The Boyar's Wife Morozova (1884). The faces were all drawn by
Surikov from Old Believers living in Moscow.
The Faberge Workshop in Moscow crafted objects in a Russian style that was very different from the Classical and Rococo jewels it made in Petersburg. Above: Imperial Presentation Kovsh (an ancient type of ladle) in green nephrite, gold, enamel and diamonds, presented by the Tsar Nicholas II to the French Ambassador in 1906. Below: Silversiren vase by Sergei Vashkov (1908). The female bird wears a kokoshnik and her
wings are set with tourmalines.
THE ARTIST AND THE PEOPLE'SCAUSE. Ilya Repin's Portrait of Vladimir Stasov (1873), the nationalist critic whose dogmatic views on the need for art to engage with the people were a towering and, at times, oppressive influence on Musorgsky and Repin. 'What a picture of the Master you have made!' the composer wrote. 'He seems to crawl out of the canvas and into the room.' Below: Repin: The Volga Barge Haulers (1873,). Stasov saw the painting as a commen- tary on the latent force of social protest in the Russian people. Opposite: Ivan Kramskoi: The Peasant Ignatii Pirogov (1874) - a startlingly ethnographic portrait of the peasant as an individual human being.
Leon Bakst: Portrait of Diaghilev with his Nanny (1906). Diaghilev had never known his mother, who had died when he was born.
