![Vitaly Tikhov - In a Russian Banya [1916]](http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5791/22973768449_a39db2e04e_o.jpg)
Vitaly Tikhov (1876 - 1939), one of the most talented students of Vladimir Makovsky’s studio, made his entrance into art history with his pictures of bathers and nudes. In the early 1910s his magnificent, large-format bath-house paintings were especially successful and much admired, earning him the graduation Gold Medal of the Imperial Academy of Arts, having studied there on two separate occasions. In the present painting the artist depicts the models in his distinctive free and rather fluid manner, sitting or standing in clouds of steam on the floor-boards of a simple Russian bath-house.
[MacDougall’s Fine Art Auctions - Oil on canvas, 132.5 x 105 cm]