Description of the painting by Mikhail Nesterov “Christ’s Bride”

Description of the painting by Mikhail Nesterov Christs Bride

“The Bride of Christ” – the first of the paintings of Nesterov, which he considered the work that opened his creative path. In it in the first, both the living soul, and suffering, and the idea were reflected – all that without which there is no true art. It was created under sad circumstances for the artist. His wife, Maria, died; she was only twenty-five years old. Heartbroken, Nesterov undertook to write “The Christ’s Bride”, endowing her with the face of his late wife, and in such a way he threw out his grief on the canvas. The result was a living, breathing, touching for the very soul of the picture.

Christ’s brides were called nuns because of a vow of abstinence. Not belonging to any earthly man, every nun belonged to the Lord, and therefore had to maintain purity and integrity. The painting depicts a girl in a dress worn by Old Believers. Dark, strict, it sits on the figure,

a white shirt with a long sleeve hides his hands, and a scarf embroidered with blue pattern, neck and hair. Only the face lives – with delicate features, strict, holy. It shows that the main life of a girl is in a different world. finding a voice

God in nature around herself and herself, she no longer needs the primitive amusements of the world. Her contemporaries marry, nurse children, guess at Svyatki, bake cakes and dance with songs, heavy and high. She, having retired to a monastery, is no longer interested in all this. She will have neither a husband nor children. Bright beads, pearl earrings, embroidered sundresses are no longer about her. Shutting down inside itself, looking at God, she is absorbed in this activity.

Christ’s bride lives this way. In harmony and peace, in simple work, in helping people. Passion and pain pass by her, leaving her indifferent. Sinful desires die without being born, and it is so easy to imagine how she gets up and goes straight to the sky right in her blue sarafan.


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Description of the painting by Mikhail Nesterov “Christ’s Bride”