In a Warm Land

Nikolai Yaroshenko painted this in 1890 in Kislovodsk, the spa town in the Caucasus foothills where he spent his summers. The woman resting among cushions on a sunlit veranda is Anna Chertkova, a writer, and the wife of Vladimir Chertkov, who was Leo Tolstoy's closest disciple and the man who published and guarded his work. So this quiet southern scene sits right at the edge of the Tolstoyan world, with its talk of simple living and moral reform. Yaroshenko himself led a double life: by training an artillery officer at a St Petersburg munitions works, by conviction one of the Wanderers, the painters who broke with the academy to show Russian life plainly. His widow gave the canvas to the museum after he died in 1898.