The artist is Ermolaev
In the first half of the 1930s b. N. Ermolaev creates a whole gallery of portrait images of the Red Navy and marine commanders. „The marine theme “attracts it almost from his youth: Ermolaev shared his studies in art workshops with the work of the sailor in a trading port. Being a first-class draftsman, Ermolaev in the painting of the 1930s seeks to follow the traditions of naive art, consciously subordinating this task to his artistic skills. Working on field sketches in the conditions of the workshop, he lovingly and carefully prescribes his characters, at the same time almost depriving them of material reality, creating a condensed atmosphere of the special world of his painting like his contemporary Andrei Platonov did in his prose.