Boris Kustodiev’s Portrait of Nikolai Milioti, 1916

A quick trip to St Petersburg yielded a few China Rhyming sort of things, such as….This is Boris Kustodiev’s portrait of the artist Nikolai Milioti from 1916 which is in Saint Petersburg’s Russian Museum . Kustodiev (1878-1927) was a noted painter and stage set designer close to the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) group. Nikolai Miloti (1874-1962) is less well remembered than Kustodiev today though was also close to the Mir Iskusstva group. Milioti was a Muscovite who studied at Moscow University and at the Sorbonne. Milioti fought on the Austrian Front in World War One, hence the uniform in this 1916 portrait. After the Bolshevik Revolution he became an exile, first in Bulgaria and then in France, where he died in the 1960s.

So why the Japanese print prominently on the wall behind Milioti? Well, Mir Iskusstva, which included artists as well as other cultural impresarios, such as Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes, took inspiration for art styles and forms around the world. They produced a magazine; prominent members included Alexandre Benois, Konstantin Somov, Dmitry Filosofov, Léon Bakst, Eugene Lansere. The group was extremely interested in Japanese art and their magazine reprinted woodblocks by Japanese masters Hokusai (he of the Wave) and Hiroshige.

Sorry, can’t quite identify the picture in the background to any specific link – seems to be a kabuki actor?