Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky review – 'intense, tortured and troubled'

National Portrait Gallery, London
Enjoyed War and Peace? Then visit this showcase of Russian portraits whose artists share the sensitivity and searching unease of the writers they portray

The National Portrait Gallery recently explored The Face of Britain in an exhibition of the same name curated by Simon Schama. Its new exhibition – a collection of portraits of writers, musicians, actors and artistic patrons lent from the superb Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow – might have been called The Face of Russia.

How different those faces are. Russia, in this gathering of cultural heroes from the later 19th century up to 1914, is intense, tortured and troubled. I counted two and a half smiles in the entire exhibition. One of the women who does manage to bend her lips at all is the opera singer Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel, whose husband was the brilliant and tormented artist Mikhail Vrubel. Soon after painting one of his many portraits of her, Vrubel was in a mental hospital. She didn’t have much to smile about after all.

I counted two and a half smiles in the entire exhibition

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