Menschikow in Beresowo

Alexander Menshikov had been the most powerful man in Russia after Peter the Great, a commander and near-ruler who once effectively governed the empire. This painting shows what came next. In 1727 he was stripped of everything and sent with his children to Berezov, a remote settlement in Siberia, where he soon died. Surikov crowds the whole family into a low peasant hut, and the detail people notice is the ceiling. Menshikov sits brooding, and you sense that if he stood he could not straighten up in the room. His eldest daughter Maria, once promised in marriage to the young Tsar Peter II, sits pale and ill beside him. The idea came to Surikov on a rainy day when his own family sat waiting out the weather in a cramped cottage.