Mikhail Nesterov – Lonely Woman: I wandered for ever about these lovely solitudes, gathering flower after flower

“I wandered for ever about these lovely solitudes, gathering flower after flower, singing as I might the wild melodies of the country, or occupied by pleasant day dreams. My greatest pleasure was the enjoyment of a serene sky amidst these verdant woods: yet I loved all the changes of Nature; and rain, and storm, and the beautiful clouds of heaven brought their delights with them. When rocked by the waves of the lake my spirits rose in triumph as a horseman feels with pride the motions of his high fed steed. But my pleasures arose from the contemplation of nature alone, I had no companion: my warm affections finding no return from any other human heart were forced to run waste on inanimate objects.”

(Mary Shelley, Mathilda)

Mikhail Nesterov (1862-1942, Russian), Lonely Woman, 1922

I have been wanting to write about the Russian painter Mikhail Nesterov for many years now but I simply never got round to it, never felt particularly inspired about any particular painting because they are all so interesting. These days his painting “Lonely Woman” from 1922 is particularly interesting to me, mostly because of the mood but also the autumnal landscape is fitting for this time of the year. The painting shows a woman dressed in black and standing somewhere in the meadow. There is stillness in the air and certainly so in the woman’s pose as well, her shoulders seem slouched and her head seems bowed down a bit. We can sense that there is a lot of introspection going on and that the reason she came out in nature is to contemplate. The figures in Nesterov’s paintings are often dressed in traditional clothes and that makes them seem as if they are not only out of time and place, but also belonging completely to some other world. The white clouds are hanging low above the treetops and the oranges and browns are slowly taking over the verdant landscapes. Time is passing and there is no way to stop it. The woman’s mind must be flooded by memories and troubled by indecisions. Her lonely figure and the apparent sadness reminded me of Mary Shelley’s character Mathilda from the novel of the same name. Mathilda is, in her own words, a “maiden in love with death” and one of her favourite past-times is to wander out and about on the meadows and moors, seeking landscapes that suit her emotions and finding solace in the natural world.

The world captured in Nesterov’s paintings and the world portrayed here in this painting are the worlds of gone by days, places of stilness, tradition and repose while in reality the years in which some of these paintings, this one in 1922 for example, were particularly turbulent in a political and social sense in Russian. These paintings were, perhaps, for Nesterov as well as for us a means of escaping the reality with its changes and the fast-paced life, and retreating into a world which is a mix of old times and a fairy tale.