History and Culture: Exhibition of Boris Kustodiev's works "Merchant Russia" presented in Saint-Petersburg

The Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts presents the exhibition of Boris Kustodiev's works "Merchant Russia".

The exposition was opened in the Pavel Chistyakov House-Museum (Saint-Petersburg). It spotlights the last period of the artist's work. At the end of life, Kustodiev was a prisoner to his chair, but he continued to create Russian types dear to his heart. A series of watercolours was intended for the publication "Rus'. Russian Types by Boris Kustodiev''. These bright, expressive works convey the original charm of Russian provincial life. They reveal the artist's joy and love of life, interest in everything authentic Russian, which permeates all his work.

Kustodiev's series of watercolours "Russian Types" pictures various Russian types with kind and gentle humour. It features powerful merchants and corpulent merchants' wives, respectable dealers and clever innkeepers, gaunt nuns and cunning priests. He managed to combine the simplicity and convention of folk art with high professional skill. In the autumn of 1922, the "Akvilon" publishing house ordered an introductory article to the famous prose writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, a proficient in provincial Russia. The writer felt deeply the world depicted by the artist and composed a story in the style of the folk dream-utopia "Rus'. Kustodiev's City", which entered the publication.

The exhibition also presents two paintings and pencil sketches by Kustodiev from the collection of the Brodsky Museum-Apartment. They also highlight the life of peasants and provincial bourgeois.

The exhibition will run at the Pavel Chistyakov House-Museum until April 23, 2021.