3. Portrait of Nadyezhda Vyetrova (attributed to Nikolai Panov or Boris Molchanov, c. 1923) I acquired this painting from a London dealer specializing in Soviet art who was pleased to be rid of an unsigned picture of uncertain provenance. My fascination with it in fact comes from this very ambiguity; rather like viewing an object through one eye and then the other its meaning shifts as I attribute it firstly to the artist Panov and then again to his rival Molchanov. Nadyezhda Vyetrova had married Nikolai Panov in 1917. However, at the time this painting was made, she was involved in an affair which she had been coerced into by the opportunistic Boris Molchanov. The view in the painting of St. Savior Cathedral indicates that it was painted in Molchanov's studio. Panov, unaware of his wife's infidelity was then making a likeness of Molchanov, which also appears unfinished in Nadyezhda's portrait. On discovering the affair, Panov left Moscow a broken man, and painted little before his death in the siege of Leningrad. Molchanov's career on the other hand advanced rapidly through the patronage of the Red Army, until by the thirties he had attained both power and influence. Nevertheless he did nothing to save Nadya when she was arrested on the orders of the Peoples' Commissar for Internal Affairs. Of the three only Molchanov survived into the postwar period where an account of his career as a court painter may be read in any Soviet history.