La boyarda Morózova

Surikov is painting a Moscow winter in the 1670s, a generation after the Russian church split over Patriarch Nikon's reforms. Feodosia Morozova, a wealthy noblewoman, refused to accept the new rites and clung to the old faith, and here she is being dragged through the snow on a sledge toward prison and, eventually, death by starvation. The whole picture hangs on one gesture. She throws up her hand with two fingers raised, the way Old Believers made the sign of the cross before the reform demanded three. The crowd around the sledge splits between mockery and grief, faces Surikov built from real people he watched on Moscow streets. He grew up in Siberia among Old Believers and knew their martyr stories from childhood. The canvas is huge, three metres tall, and the Tretyakov bought it straight off the 1887 travelling exhibition.