At the sexton

Painted in 1915, near the end of Makovsky's long career, "At the Sexton" depicts a scene set in the administrative office of a Russian Orthodox church — the sexton (or sacristan) being the lay official responsible for maintaining church property, ringing bells, and assisting with services. Such figures occupied a specific stratum of Russian religious and social life, neither clergy nor laity, respected for their church connection but socially modest. By 1915, Makovsky was in his mid-seventies, and this late genre scene reveals a painter still acutely observant of Russian social types and their characteristic environments. The subject reflects the documentary impulse of the Peredvizhniki tradition — recording the specific textures of Russian provincial and ecclesiastical life that was undergoing rapid change as industrialisation and revolutionary tension reshaped Russian society. The Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts' holding of this late work suggests it entered provincial collections, typical for Makovsky's less celebrated later output.

A late Makovsky canvas shows the accumulated confidence of decades of genre painting — assured figure placement, practiced rendering of ecclesiastical interior details (candles, icons, registers), and the warm, somewhat golden tonality that characterised his mature palette. Brushwork is controlled and descriptive, prioritising legibility of character over painterly experiment.