Merchant wife at tea

Kustodiev painted this feast in 1918, in a Petrograd where there was almost nothing to eat. The revolution was a year old, the city was cold and hungry, and the painter himself was confined to a wheelchair by a crippling illness. Out of all that he conjured its opposite, a plump merchant's wife on a balcony at teatime, a gleaming samovar beside her, a split watermelon, apples, and a cat rubbing at her shoulder. It is a picture of a comfortable old Russia that had already gone. The young woman who posed was a neighbour, a baroness studying medicine, standing in for a merchant class the new state was busy abolishing. Everything piled on that table was a luxury the artist could no longer find in the shops below.