What's going on in Vladimir Makovsky's painting ‘Two Mothers’?

In his works, artist Vladimir Makovsky devoted considerable attention, not only to everyday details, but also to the psychology of human relationships. One striking example is the painting ‘Two Mothers. The Real Mother and the Adoptive Mother’. The painting was painted in 1905-1906. Before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, it was in the possession of the Shikhobalovs, the artist's friends, who were Samara merchants and philanthropists. 

Makovsky is known to have based the plot in the painting on a true story that occurred in the family of an artist friend. For some reason, a peasant woman abandons her newborn son. The boy is then taken in by a wealthy city family. Several years later, the biological mother finds her son and approaches the adoptive family, demanding her son back.

The artist was sensitive to the psychology of the moment. The figure of the peasant woman in a red headscarf is the dominant color and compositional focus of the painting. She exudes a sense of force and self-righteousness. The boy, frightened by the visit of a strange woman, jumps up from his high chair and clings to his adoptive mother. She embraces him, simultaneously bowing before the strength of the visitor.

The old woman is also disconcerted: she is most likely an elderly nanny, who raised one of the boy's adoptive parents. Only the head of the family calmly smokes and casts an appraising glance at the guest, wondering how much money she would accept for giving up her son a second time.

Another important fact for understanding the scene: adoption in Russia in the early 1900s (before 1917) was very different from today. Not everyone could adopt. For example, those who had their own legitimate children could not adopt. Exceptions were made only for the adoption of relatives (for example, nephews) or if one's own children had died. A married woman, meanwhile, could adopt only with her husband's consent and a single woman could not adopt at all.

The law strictly prohibited the adoption of persons from the "upper classes" (nobles and merchants) by "lower classes". This meant that a peasant or townsperson could not adopt a noble child. The reverse (a nobleman adopting a peasant child) was possible, but rare in practice.

Therefore, for most orphans, especially those from the lower classes, the path to adoption was closed. Their fate was determined through the orphanage system or by being adopted into a family as a "foster child" or "adoptive child". Such children lacked the legal rights of adopted children and often grew up as servants or laborers.

Therefore, the scene seen in Makovsky's painting – a wealthy family adopting a peasant's son as their own – was, indeed, rather an exception, emphasizing the nobility of the adoptive parents' actions, which ran counter to the class barriers of the time.