Home and Family. Images of Peaceful Life

The Russian Museum exhibition project Artists on War and Peace can be seen as a diptych comprised of two exhibitions: Images of Military Life in Russian Art of the 16th to 20th Centuries and Home and Family. Images of Peaceful Life. They explore two existential aspects of human life perceived as polar opposites. The first half of the diptych features scenes of everyday life during wartime, while the other focuses on the theme of the home and family as guardian of the moral values of the Russian people.

Home and Family. Images of Peaceful Life conveys the warmth and emotion of tranquil daily life within the circle of the family. The works on display reveal insights into how genre scenes were rendered by artists who lived during the peak of the romantic and sentimentalist era, proponents of critical realism, and Soviet-era artists.

Motifs that characterize the concepts of “home” and “family” (“the family circle”, “children at home”, “peace and tranquillity”, and “at the table”) run through the exhibition, which includes close to 100 artworks from the Russian Museum’s repositories. Visitors will have the unique opportunity to see rarely exhibited artworks by well-known artists like Ivan Kramskoi, Vladimir Makovsky, Illarion Pryanishnikov, Kirill Lemoch, Vasily Maximov, Alexei Korzukhin, Boris Kustodiev, Yury Kugach, and others. This world of intimate domestic images, poignantly communicating the essence of home and hearth, is also populated by works from lesser known artists. The paintings in the exhibition are accompanied by thematically relevant sculptures, applied and folk artwork, lithographic prints, and photographs.

 The exhibition is organised with the support of AlfaStrakhovanie Group.