Mikhail Nesterov

Mikhail Nesterov made his name in 1890 with a boy and a saint. His 'Vision to the Youth Bartholomew' shows the shepherd child who would become Sergius of Radonezh, medieval Russia's most loved monk, meeting a mysterious elder in a pale birch landscape. The thin northern light and the hush of it struck a deep chord.

For the next quarter-century he painted a quiet, devout old Russia: hermits, nuns, pilgrims, wooden churches, women in white by still water. It was a vision of holiness set in the countryside rather than the cathedral.

Then the revolution swept that world away, and religious painting became dangerous. Nesterov, already old, reinvented himself as a portraitist, and a very fine one. He painted the surgeon Sergei Yudin at work, the sculptor Vera Mukhina modelling, and the physiologist Ivan Pavlov leaning forward with clenched fists, alive with thought. He went on painting these Soviet faces until his death in 1942, at 79, one of the few of his generation to find a place in the new order.