Boris Kustodiev (1878-1927) was a Russian painter and stage designer from the city of Astrakhan.
He was fascinated with old, rural Russia which he felt was steadily but surely vanishing. At the time of the Russian Revolution (1917), he created a series of paintings which were intended to be a farewell to the provincial “Holy Russia” he know from long ago. The paintings are full of movement and warmth and give out a sense of the familiar and of the homely. They mix the tradition of old Russian lubok (a type of Russian popular print characterized by simple images and narratives inspired from literature, religious stories and popular tales), but also have strong elements from the Brueghels (featuring everyday scenes of peasants and landscapes, but charged with meaning) as well as of the Venetian vedutisti (large-scale paintings mostly depicting landscapes with a strong accent on details).
While Kustodiev did have some political paintings which contributed to the creation of the new socialist society, a strong part of his body of work is a collection of timeless paintings that feel as aestheral as they feel concrete and which seem to be a great mix between the feelings over a world and a pure visual, anthropological documentation.
