The third volume of a six-part survey of the State Tretyakov Gallery gathers 798 scenes of everyday life by 191 artists, from the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. This is the volume where Russian painting learns to tell stories. Pavel Fedotov stages small domestic catastrophes with the timing of a playwright; Vasily Perov follows a funeral sledge through the snow and does not look away; Vladimir Makovsky fills waiting rooms, taverns and railway carriages with people who have somewhere else to be. Vasily Vereshchagin brings back Central Asia; Abram Arkhipov and Boris Kustodiev bring back the fair, the laundry and the holiday crowd. Work and rest, weddings and wakes, markets, classrooms, courtrooms and kitchens. Large reproductions, each with its painter, title and date.

Alexander Nemirov is the publisher of Aeneas Press. For The Gallery Masterworks he chose the plates and their order, checked the rights of every reproduction, and wrote the English captions and commentary.