The Merchant's Wife at Tea
Boris Kustodiev (1878 to 1927) · 1918
A plump, rosy woman in a lilac dress sits on a balcony with a table laden for tea: a samovar, a watermelon sliced open, grapes, apples, a cake, a plate of sweet buns. A fat cat rubs against her shoulder, and beyond the railing spreads a provincial Russian town of white churches, shop signs and a golden evening sky. She holds her saucer with the little finger raised, the classic gesture of merchant class tea drinking, and looks out at the world with placid satisfaction.
Kustodiev builds the picture like a folk print or a painted shop sign: bright, flat colours, everything on display, no atmospheric haze. Yet the handling is sophisticated. Look at the sheen on the samovar, the translucence of the watermelon flesh and the subtle greys in the white tablecloth. The woman's shoulders and arms are painted with a soft, rounded fullness that the artist openly admired; he believed that this generous body type was as much a part of Russian beauty as the church domes behind her. The model was in fact a student, Galina Aderkas, who was slim in life and was rounded out by the painter.
The painting dates from nineteen eighteen, the first year after the Revolution, when the merchant world it celebrates had just been abolished and the artist himself was confined to a wheelchair by spinal disease. It is therefore a memory picture, made with love and a little irony, of a Russia that had ceased to exist. Kustodiev went on to paint several variations. The Russian Museum's canvas is the original and most famous. Notice the cat: its expression of contented greed mirrors its owner's, and it is the detail visitors remember.
Did You Know? Kustodiev painted this feast of plenty during the hungry winter of nineteen eighteen, working from a wheelchair in a cold Petrograd flat.
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