The Beauty
Boris Kustodiev, 1915
The Beauty is a nude that Boris Kustodiev painted in 1915, at a time when illness had left him confined to a wheelchair with paralysed legs. The scene shows a full-figured woman who has just woken and sits half upright among embroidered pillows on a satin bed, her pose one of calm and slightly uncertain expectation. For the model he used Faina Shevchenko, an actress from the Moscow Art Theatre, whose generous figure suited the kind of woman that inspired him, very different from his own wife. The picture blends Russian nationalist romanticism, the popular imagery of the lubok and a classicism that Kustodiev associated with Titian and Rubens, and it pushes the figure towards irony and exaggeration. Nudes were uncommon in Russian art of the period, so the work stands out within his output. It became one of his best-known paintings and a touchstone for what came to be called the Kustodiev beauty, an idealised vision of provincial Russia before the revolution. He later returned to the same figure in smaller variants dated 1918, 1919 and 1921.
- Painter
- Boris Kustodiev
- Date
- 1915
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 141 × 186 cm
- Museum
- Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
- Genre
- nude
- Depicts
- nudity, Faina Shevchenko, woman
More works by Boris Kustodiev
