The Unequal Marriage, painted by Vasili Pukirev in 1862, shows a very young bride forced to marry a rich old man in an Orthodox church. It attacked a practice every Russian knew: families marrying daughters off for money. A young man standing behind the couple is said to be Pukirev himself.
When it went on show at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg in 1863, the picture became the talk of the capital, and the thirty-year-old painter was made a professor on the strength of this one canvas.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Who the bride was is where the story splits in two. One account says she was Praskovya Varentsova, a woman Pukirev is said to have loved. Another says she was Sofya Rybnikova, married off to a rich manufacturer, and that the heartbroken man was not Pukirev at all but his friend Sergei Varentsov.
Both accounts end at the same altar, with a man who loved the bride watching her marry for money. I would not bet on either one, and the man standing at the edge of the picture may not be the painter at all.
Who was the bride, really?
She had two names, depending on who told the story. The first is Praskovya Matveevna Varentsova. In 2002 the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow acquired a pencil portrait of her, drawn in 1907 by an artist named Vladimir Sukhov. Its inscription says she was the woman from whom Pukirev painted his famous canvas 44 years earlier.
The second name is Sofya Rybnikova, the daughter of a rich manufacturer. It comes from the memoirs of Nikolai Varentsov, a Moscow merchant, who wrote about his relative Sergei Varentsov. In his words, Sergei and Sofya were in love with each other.
Her parents married her to Andrei Karzinkin, an older and richer manufacturer, and Sergei allegedly stood at the wedding as best man. Nikolai Varentsov believed the painting came from that day.
Both stories were written down long after 1863, and neither has been proved. The only document, Sukhov's inscription, dates from 44 years after the canvas. The man watching the groom from behind her is just as hard to name.
What You'll Discover
Who stands with his arms folded.
What the groom wears to church.
What Russia said in 1863.
What became of the painter.