31.05.1862 – 18.10.1942

Mikhail Nesterov was born in Ufa on May 31, 1862, in a merchant family, and his father expected to see the successor of his business in his son. However, in Michael, the craving for art was awakened early, it was not easy to reconcile with this family, but nevertheless in 1876 Mikhail Nesterov entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. His teachers were such eminent artists as Savrasov, Pryanishnikov, Perov.

In the summer of 1883, Nesterov met with Maria Martynovskaya. We can say that this meeting was a turning point in the fate of the artist. As he wrote in his memoirs: “My love for Masha and her loss made me an artist, put my feelings, emotions and soul into my work, in a word, everything that was lacking before, and everything that people valued and valued in my pictures “. The image of his beloved wife can be traced in most of the female images of Nesterov. The heroines of his paintings are full of beauty and humility, suffering and spiritual light.

In the Voronezh Art Museum. I. N. Kramskoy is a picture of Mikhail Nesterov’s “Fairy Tale”. Master with great love transmits the harmony of man and nature, the originality of the soul of a Russian woman, her beauty and sorrow.

After the October Revolution, Nesterov mostly portraits, in the 1930s he creates a series of portraits of his remarkable contemporaries – the sculptor Vera Mukhina, the scientist Ivan Pavlov, the artist Elizaveta Kruglikova and many others.

In recent years, Nesterov is working on a book of memories, which was published several months before his death. He died on October 18, 1942, and on his gravestone only four words were broken: “Artist Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov.”