Portrait of Count Leo Tolstoy

Mikhail Nesterov painted Russian religious life without the ceremony. Monks walking through birch woods, hermits, novices in pale habits, all set in landscape that carries as much of the feeling as the figures do. The tone is contemplative rather than devotional. The Vision to the Youth Bartholomew, from 1890, is the picture that established him. It shows the boy who became Saint Sergius meeting a monk in a field, painted with thin spring colour and an almost flattened space. He worked on church decoration for years, then after 1917 the subject became impossible and he turned to portraiture. Those late portraits of scientists, surgeons and sculptors are direct and unsentimental, and several are considered among the best Soviet era portraits, which is an odd end for a painter who spent his youth on saints.