ロシアのヴィーナス

Boris Kustodiev painted this in 1925 and 1926, and it was the last major work he finished before his death in 1927. What makes that remarkable is his body. Since 1916 he had been paralysed from the waist down, painting from a wheelchair, sometimes with the canvas tilted above him. Yet almost none of his late pictures show any of that pain. Here he gives Russia its own Venus, a full-figured young woman stepping out of a village bathhouse into the steam, with snow and wooden walls behind her. His daughter Irina posed for the figure. It is a frank, generous celebration of ordinary Russian life, and the picture now hangs in a museum in Nizhny Novgorod.