Vassili Vladimirovich Pukiryov

Look for the young man standing just behind the bride, arms folded, watching. In Vasili Pukirev's most famous canvas, The Unequal Marriage of 1862, that onlooker is widely taken to be the painter himself, present at a wedding he was powerless to stop.

Pukirev was born in 1832 to a poor peasant family in Tula province, south of Moscow, and worked his way through the Moscow School of Painting to the title of academician. His picture shows a frightened young girl being married to a wealthy old man, the kind of arrangement Russian reformers were starting to attack in print. Pavel Tretyakov, the Moscow collector whose gallery still holds the work, bought it almost at once.

The subject was close to home. The bride was long identified with Praskovya Varentsova, a woman Pukirev had loved and lost to a richer suitor. Around 1907 she was found living out her last years in a Moscow almshouse, and an artist drew her there as an old woman.