“Requiem” … A melancholy melody of strict lines and transparent watercolor tones. On the background of the park and the majestic palace, a group of women in long light dresses paused on the stone slabs. She stopped and moved apart – and in the middle there was a lonely, separated from everyone figure of the lady in the brightest, as if shining dress.
Looking at it, it is easy to recognize in it a dress in which Musatov always portrayed Nadezhda Yuryevna, now dead, her old friend. Only now, according to her husband’s remark, this outfit is “strangely changed and blossomed with roses.” Her right hand hung helplessly, a mysterious album was kept in the left… “. Nadezhda Yurievna wrote poetry, which only close people knew, and Musatov often depicted her with a book in his hands.
The beautiful face of Nadezhda Yuryevna, framed by dark, sculpture-heavy curls, is lowered and her eyes are closed: she completely disconnected from this world. but he feels and knows everything that happens around. Its solemn-radiant appearance is merged in one harmony with the powerful, as if “organ” sound of the palace architecture going upwards. On the left and right of the ladies there are two more images of Nadezhda Yuryevna. These are not “doubles” – it’s terrestrial, living images in different states of mind and at different ages.
On the extreme left, she looks straight ahead in the naively trusting gaze of a young girl, and the same outfit shimmers on her with a simple and natural coloring. In the group on the right, she stands second – as if grown and thin, with traces of past suffering, but still whispering trustingly to a young lady who listens to her with secretly unkind curiosity. Exquisitely harmonious composition of the composition is permeated with “currents” of human feelings, the subtlest psychological picture.
Two living hypostases of the image of Nadezhda Yuryevna, like two rays, gather and flare up with white radiance in a central, generalized figure. And around almost everything, except for the only tall woman in whom the features of Elena Vladimirovna Musatov’s wife, who looks at Nadezhda Yuryevna with tender care, are recognized – everything around is openly hostile… So it was in the life of this beautiful woman. But she, as Musatov wrote in a letter to her husband, forgave in my picture all – she was an extraordinary woman, far from the usual vulgarity of enemies…
Stanyukovich himself appreciated the canvas dedicated to his wife: “Requiem” is one of the wonders, one of the tops of art. “I must say that the canvas was the last” forgive “not only to his friend, but also to the life of the artist himself – he put the last smears in the moment of his death.
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