Boris Kustodiev

By 1916 Boris Kustodiev could no longer walk. A tumour on his spinal cord, and the surgery to remove it, left him paralysed from the waist down and often in great pain, working from a wheelchair with the canvas tilted almost flat above him.

What he painted from that chair is the least invalid art imaginable. Broad-hipped merchants' wives take tea on sunny balconies, whole towns turn out for the pancake festival of Maslenitsa, troikas race over blue snow, fairground crowds glow under coloured banners. This was the plump, provincial, pre-revolutionary Russia of his childhood on the Volga, remembered in hot reds and golds.

He kept at it through revolution and civil war, when the real country outside was cold and hungry. He designed sets and posters for the new Soviet stage, and painted a towering portrait of the singer Feodor Chaliapin in a fur coat against a winter fair. He died in 1927, at 49, of the illness that had pinned him in place for a decade.