Children. Sasha and Yura Serov

Children. Sasha and Yura Serov (1899), at the Russian Museum, is an intimate portrait of two of Valentin Serov's own children — Alexander (Sasha) and Yuri (Yura) — that reveals a more personal and tender aspect of an artist better known for his penetrating portraits of the Russian elite. Serov had six children with his wife Olga Trubnikova, and the demands of family life alongside a busy professional career are a recurring subtext of his biography. Portraits of the artist's own children occupy a special place in the history of portraiture: freed from the social pressures of commission, they tend to show greater emotional directness and less formal conventionality. The Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, which holds one of the two great collections of Russian art alongside the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, acquired this work as part of its comprehensive collection of Serov's output. The painting belongs to the period of Serov's mature naturalistic style, when he was fully in command of his technical means and producing work that was both psychologically acute and visually sumptuous.

Oil on canvas with the warm, naturalistic handling Serov brought to intimate domestic subjects. Children are technically demanding subjects — their features are less strongly defined than adults, their expressions more transient and harder to fix in a single pose. Serov's handling is observational rather than idealizing, capturing his sons as real children rather than idealized figures.