Tea Drinking in Mytishchi (The Tea Drinkers)

"Tea Drinking in Mytishchi" is one of Perov's most celebrated anti-clerical works, depicting a fat, self-satisfied priest enjoying tea at an outdoor table while a blind war veteran with a child guide stands before him, clearly begging. The priest avoids acknowledging them; a servant waves the supplicants away. Mytishchi was a town north of Moscow famous for its water supply and for the tea houses that lined the road, frequented by travellers returning from the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery. The religious pilgrimage context makes the priest's indifference to the suffering of others especially pointed — he has presumably come from or is travelling to a place of spiritual significance while demonstrating none of its values. Perov exhibited this work in 1862, the year after the Emancipation, when Russian society was debating the moral failures of its institutions. The Dorich House Museum's version may be one of several related to this work, as the subject had multiple versions.

The composition juxtaposes the rotund, well-served priest and the emaciated, ragged veteran in a tableau of moral contrast. Perov uses naturalistic outdoor light — dappled through foliage — to illuminate both figures equally, refusing to dramatize or sentimentalize. The tea service and the priest's figure are rendered with material specificity that functions as social evidence.