Tamara and Demon

Tamara and Demon, painted in 1889 and held at the Serpukhov historical-art museum, illustrates Makovsky's engagement with one of the most popular literary sources in Russian romantic painting: Mikhail Lermontov's narrative poem The Demon (1839), which tells the story of a fallen angel who falls in love with the Georgian princess Tamara with fatal consequences. The poem's combination of Caucasian landscape, supernatural romance, and tragic love appealed powerfully to Russian romantic sensibility, and it attracted visual interpretation from dozens of painters throughout the century, most famously Mikhail Vrubel. Makovsky's treatment engages with the same literary source as Vrubel's more celebrated versions but brings to it a different pictorial temperament — more conventionally beautiful, less psychologically disturbing — reflecting the difference between the two artists' artistic personalities.

Oil on canvas with the atmospheric handling appropriate to a subject combining supernatural and romantic elements. The contrast between the supernatural figure of the Demon and the mortal figure of Tamara required Makovsky to differentiate their painterly treatment to suggest different orders of being.