The Beauty

Kustodiev painted this in 1915, in the second year of the First World War, and there is no hint of any of it here. Instead a warm, ample woman rises from a bed of red and flowered fabrics, everything soft and abundant, a hymn to the old provincial merchant Russia he loved. His model was Faina Shevchenko, an actress at the Moscow Art Theatre, whom he had spotted while working there as a set designer. She refused at first and only agreed, she said, for the sake of art. What makes the picture remarkable is that Kustodiev was by now gravely ill with a tumour of the spine, painting these images of health and plenty largely from memory. He preferred full figures, and once said that skinny women did not inspire him.