Die ungleiche Ehe

Pukirev's most famous version of this scene stunned the Moscow public in 1862, and this is his own later painting of the same subject, made in 1875. The story it tells had teeth in that era. A girl of barely seventeen stands at the altar beside a groom old enough to be her grandfather, her face pale and downcast, her eyes reddened as if she has been crying. Around them the wedding proceeds all the same. Marriages arranged for money over a young bride's wishes were common enough that people recognised the scene at once, and the earlier painting was talked about as a quiet protest against them. Pukirev knew the subject from close up, and one long-repeated account holds that the wedding was drawn from a disappointment in his own life. Every other figure sits in shadow. The bride, in her white dress, is the one patch of light he lets into the church.