Maid with children

"Maid with Children" (1883), at the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, depicts a domestic subject that was central to the Russian genre tradition: the relationship between a household maid (dvorovaya, or servant) and the children in her care. The employment of domestic servants was universal across Russian middle-class and aristocratic households, and the figure of the devoted maid or nanny — nurturing children not her own — carried enormous cultural significance in a society where such relationships often lasted lifetimes and crossed class boundaries with emotional intensity. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina had appeared in serial form during the 1870s, and the figure of the devoted domestic servant was freshly alive in the cultural imagination. Makovsky's canvas addresses this relationship with the sympathetic but unsentimental eye that characterised his best genre work.

Oil on canvas allows Makovsky to render the interaction between adult and children with full psychological complexity — the maid's care expressed through body language and proximity, the children's responsiveness in their postures and expressions. The domestic interior setting is characterised through selective detail of furniture and light.