Monks at the Door of a Mosque

Vereshchagin travelled with the Russian army in Turkestan in the late 1860s, the newly conquered lands of Central Asia around Tashkent and Samarkand, and the dervishes he met there kept turning up in his pictures through the following decade. Dervishes were Muslim holy men who wandered and lived on alms, and the museum's title calls them monks. These wear patchwork robes and tall pointed caps, with gourd vessels hanging at their sides, and they wait by a carved wooden door set into a wall of glazed tiles. A canvas on the same subject, dated 1873, is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. This panel is dated only to the 1870s. In November 1888 Vereshchagin opened a large show in New York, the first solo exhibition of a Russian artist in America, and it travelled on to Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston. In 1891 the whole collection, 110 paintings, was sold at auction in New York. How this panel came to Boston is not recorded. Its first known owner was Mary Rich Richardson, who lived in Boston and Newport, and it entered the Museum of Fine Arts with her bequest in 1925.