The team in collaboration with the National Art Museum have found the model's carver
We now know who carved the Model of the Summer Camp, thanks to a chance visit to the Russian Ethnographic Museum in Saint Petersburg! Eleanor Peers was at a conference in Saint Petersburg, and just had time to pop into the Russian Ethnographic Museum's permanent exhibition. Museum Curator Marina Fyoderova showed Eleanor another nineteenth-century Sakha model. It shows a Sakha farmyard, with cottages, a horse, and a cow byre. And inside the house sits a man - with exactly the same face, expression and clothing as the men in Model of a Summer Camp!
Efrosiniya Nagovitsyna at the National Art Museum has found a receipt showing that the Sakha farmyard was carved by one Nikolai Belousov, from the village of Khamagatta in Nam region, just north of Yakutsk. The figures in the carvings are so similar that Belousov must also have carved the Model of a Summer Camp.