Boyaryshnya

Boyaryshnya (Боярышня, a young woman of the boyar class) is an oil painting by the Russian artist Konstantin Makovsky, signed and dated 1884 at upper left; it is one of the many heads of young boyar women he produced, and its present location is not recorded in the sources consulted.

Makovsky, born in 1839, trained at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, which he left in 1863 as one of the fourteen students who rebelled against the rules of the Gold Medal competition. He was a founding member of the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, in 1870. From the late 1870s his interests moved from social subjects toward colour and form, under the influence of salon painters such as Bouguereau, Cabanel and Alma-Tadema, and by the 1880s he was internationally known and among the best-paid Russian painters of his time.

Alongside large historical canvases giving an idealised picture of life in pre-Petrine Russia, he painted numerous female heads, beauties and boyar girls. He collected old Russian jewellery, costume and kokoshniks and used them as studio props, and he is credited with a key role in the fashion for boyar subjects that spread through Russian, Western European and American high society around 1900. Here a young woman, shown head and shoulders against a dark ground, wears a tall kokoshnik worked with pearls and coloured stones and tied with a red ribbon, a deep collar of pearl strands with set gems, and an embroidered white garment over red. The kokoshnik was the traditional headdress of Russian women, especially in the north, and was widely worn from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The finely modelled face, with its grave, pensive gaze, contrasts with the loose, sparkling brushwork of the jewels and fabric.

Makovsky won a gold medal at the Paris World's Fair of 1889 and died in St Petersburg in 1915, after the carriage he was riding in collided with a tram.