The Uglich Museum houses a vivid portrait of Nadezhda Andreyevna Surina — the second wife of Pavel Surin who came from a family of merchants. The portrait was painted by the Uglich artist Ivan Vasilyevich Tarkhanov.

In December 1844, Pavel Matveyevich Surin became a widower and mourned his “Avdotya Mitrovna” sincerely. However, he did not stay single for long. The next March, he decided to remodel the house, and at the end of the month, he went to the town of Korchev to ask the merchant Ushatov for the hand of his daughter. In his diary, Surin wrote,

After the wedding, in October 1845, Pavel Surin commissioned a portrait of his wife in almost the same size as his own. The respectable municipal councilor in an embroidered tunic and an elegantly dressed stately woman in a wedding outfit — the two were a promising couple.

This portrait was the last one in the family gallery of the Surins painted by Tarkhanov between 1829 and 1845. Unlike the official portraits of Surin Senior and Surin Junior, in this portrait, Nadezhda Surina is depicted in a wedding outfit, presenting an example of traditional beauty. Despite the provincial gloss, the “new” Surina, white-faced and stout, represented the old ideal of female beauty that had been preserved in the national consciousness despite the popularity of delicate grace and paleness among noblemen. Plumpness was considered a privilege, a sign of a wealthy and easy life, and even of good temper and character. It was regarded as a positive quality for a wife. In this portrait, Nadezhda Surina, a “widow bride” and the mother of two sons, seems to be aware of her beauty. She has a sly look, raises her brows, and suppresses a smile. Surina’s dress is made according to the fashion of the 1840s: the plump shoulders and arms can be seen, shaded only by a short and thin see-through bridal veil. The waistline of the dress is natural, the skirt is wide, and the fabric has large and firm plaits. This image can be described by the bright epithets used by matchmakers in the plays by Alexander Ostrovsky — “a nice princess”, “a peony bud”, and “a true portrait for you”. Her hairstyle and dress seem to foreshadow the image of another bride from a merchant family — the one from Pavel Fedotov’s painting “The Major Makes a Proposal” that was created later, in 1848.