Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev

Collection of M.M.Muzalevsky, Moscow

St. Petersburg, The State Russian Museum, Posthumous Exhibition of B. Kustodiev 1878-1927, 1928, no.166

Exhibition catalogue, Posthumous Exhibition of B. Kustodiev 1878-1927, St. Petersburg, The State Russian Museum, 1928, no.166
M.Etkind, B.Kustodiev, Moscow: Sovetsky khudozhnik, 1982, no.513

Kustodiev’s best known works depict the Russian provinces and their verdant countryside in vivid colours. This romanticised vision often embraces the local customs and festivals, as well as the passing of the seasons (fig.1). The present lot is a wistful commemoration of autumn arriving in a hilltop landscape, the russet colours of the leaves reflecting the golden afternoon sky. It was exhibited in the posthumous exhibition of Kustodiev’s works in 1928 at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. The catalogue of the large 1928 Kustodiev exhibition at the Russian Museum indicates that this was one of the few paintings the artist produced in 1919.

The characteristic exuberance of Kustodiev’s works gives no indication of the illness he faced for much of his life. From late 1916 until the end of his life he was mostly wheelchair bound. Many of the countryside images he produced during these years are reminiscences of his youth. As the artist’s son later revealed, Kustodiev explicitly referred to this: ‘What else am I to do, he used to say, since losing the use of my legs in 1917? So here I am recalling the past and painting.… All I have to do is make a wish, and the picture I want appears in my mind’s eye, and these pictures follow one another like in the movies’ (Boris Kustodiev, Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1983, p.262).

The present lot recalls Kustodiev work Out for a Ride (fig.2), a self-portrait with his wife, painted in 1915 as his condition was becoming more serious.  Kustodiev imagines himself horse riding in late summer with Yulia. Both paintings feature the same pastel-coloured and expansive sky, the white and brown horses and even the same turquoise-domed church in the distance. It may be that the couple resting on the bench in Above the River, Autumn, are also a nostalgic portrayal of the artist and his wife.