池

Victor Borisov-Musatov painted this in 1902, at a country estate, using the two people closest to him as models. The two women beside the still water are his sister Yelena and his fiancee Yelena Alexandrova, whom he married soon after. He was not recording a real afternoon so much as an imagined one, a quiet world of old Russian manor houses that was already slipping away. Within three years the country would see the revolution of 1905, and Borisov-Musatov himself would be dead at 35. He worked in a mix of tempera and oil that gives the pond and sky a soft, faded, tapestry-like surface. The small square canvas hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.