He joined the revived World of Art (Mir iskusstva) movement in 1910^[1] alongside Konchalovsky, Kuznetsov, Roerich, and Serebriakova, bringing a distinctly populist energy to a movement otherwise inclined toward Versailles-inflected elegance. Where older members looked to 18th-century European court culture for inspiration, Kustodiev turned to Russian^[1] folk prints, fairground colour, and the Maslenitsa festival.

His portrait^[1] of Fyodor Chaliapin presents the bass singer as a fur-coated colossus on a snow-covered hillock while tiny, brilliantly coloured fairground figures animate the background: the imposing individual set against a miniaturised festive world drawn from lubok print tradition. The merchant's wife paintings, most famously "Merchant's Wife Drinking Tea", distil a similar vision: prosperous domesticity and decorative warmth treated not as social satire but as genuine celebration.

Between 1916^[1] and 1920 he worked on a group portrait^[1] of the World of Art artists, now held at the Russian^[1] Museum in St Petersburg (52 x 89 cm). The project was intended to be both decorative and realistic, monumental and true to life, but the ambitious large-scale version was never fully realised; the years spanned the Revolution and the First World War.