Anastasia Nikolaevna 2010

My Anastasia painting is finished. Here is a memoir of someone who knew Anastasia from the hospital she and Marie would visit. I think he has caught her quite well!
One feels she's just rushed out sight to play a new prank else where


“When the Grand Duchesses came, in particular the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, there would begin a terrible fuss and endless lines of pranks. The Grand Duchess was a desperate ‘minx’ and a loyal friend to others, especially to the tsesarevich. The two elder ones have completed courses for being “Sisters of Mercy” while she and the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna worked at sewing clothes for the wounded men and their families, helped prepare bandages and lint, and lamented for being too young to be true Sisters of Mercy like their sisters Olga and Tatiana […] So, the little princess was not able to be very naughty those days. She was given lighter work than that of her two elder sisters. One day, I sat beside the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. Her pretty face is full of life and cheerfulness. Her quick eyes which always sparkle with irrepressible joy and indefatigable enthusiasm, look sharply at everything they see and made her naughtiness apparent. Her acute, sometimes, merciless tongue tells everything she sees. She can enliven any place she sets foot in by her uncontrollable cheerful laughter. In her mischief, she would even dance with the wounded men and once said that she doesn’t like to sit just to sew! While the pale thin hands of Tatiana can quickly knit mittens, the graceful head of Olga bending low to the sewing machine, and Maria Nikolaevna was choosing a new job to do, Anastasia would not think ‘We need to sit and work..’ Instead, her quick mind would devise pranks”.

Here is her video, but also an over view of my three paintings that depict OTMA. As always as a group, OTMA packs a wallop