Konstantin Egorovich Makovsky was born into a family who considered art to be the meaning of life.
Konstantin Egorovich inherited his father’s passion for collecting art objects, antiquities, folk crafts, arts and crafts. He not only continued collecting, but also used the treasures of the objective culture of Russia collected on trips around the country in his numerous paintings.
Multi-figure compositions such as “Choice of the Bride by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich”, “Maslenitsa in St. Petersburg”, “Boyarsky Wedding Feast” and many portraits “Boyaryn” and “Boyaris” are full of authentic ethnographic details transmitted with ease and artistry.
In his artistic career, KE Makovsky enjoyed from an early age as a portrait painter, as the creator of the paintings of the “boyar cycle”, an incredible success. He earned a lot of money, he could afford a lot, but he lived according to the testimony of his contemporaries, very modestly, investing all the free money in his collection.
In the painting “Under the Crown” Makovsky refers to the timeless plot of the wedding. In the center of the composition is a middle-aged woman. She is dressed in a richly decorated embroidery and beads boyar outfit of pre-Peter the Great’s time. According to custom, before the wedding, she combs the beautiful long hair of a young girl sitting in a chair in a white dress.
Tradition prescribed unmarried girls to braid their hair in a single braid with a bow at the end or a “cutter” at the beginning of the braid. The bride was already going to the crown with the hair of a married woman: her hair was braided in two braids at the temples and arranged in a circle or around the head and a warrior was dressed on top of them. Just this scene and portrayed Konstantin Egorovich Makovsky in all its drama and festivity.
Around gathered bridesmaids, sisters and cousins, a little boy. The casket with the stones is opened, and the pearl beads slipped out of it and scattered on the dressing table. With free virtuosic brushstrokes, Makovsky writes all this Byzantine luxury and bright young faces, freely orienting himself in the patterns of carpet, lace, embroidery, embroidered bead kokoshniks and skewed.
The artist was inherent in a festive elevated vision, perhaps influenced by K. P. Bryullov with his brilliant academism. In detail, but very freely and pictorially, written out, richly decorated with embroidery and pearls of clothing, household items and furnishings in the rays of sunlight create in a multi-figured, with complex angles, a joyful festive mood.
The works of Konstantin Egorovich always unfold before the viewer, as a magnificent theatrical performance, as a grandiose performance. So in this picture the artist makes us feel the whole piercing mood of the moment, all the circumstances, all the beauty of the boyar life, all the tragedy and the whole festivity of the event.
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