The history of the Palace begins with the birth of Grand Duke Mikhail. In 1798 Emperor Paul I ordered to save several hundred thousand roubles to built a future palace for his younger son. When Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich reached the age of 21 and the sum was 9 millions the construction of the palace was started. The palace was designed and built by Carlo Rossi (1775–1849) – a brilliant architect who created the largest Empire architectural ensembles which completed the building-up of the central part of St Petersburg in the 1810s–1820s.
The city complex with the Mikhailovsky Palace in the centre is a real pearl among the creations of the great architect. The architect managed to achieve harmony between the palace building and the landscape, and the surrounding architecture. The sculptural, figurative, plastic, carved and other kinds of décor were created by the prominent sculptors Vasily Demut-Malinovsky and Stepan Pimenov, painters Pietro and Giovanni Batista Scotti, Antonio Vigi, Barnaba Medici, Fyodor Brullo and many others.
Carlo Rossi made detailed plans of everything: from a cast iron grating with his favourite military attributes on the gate to the lay out of the park, from the solution of the city building problems to the design of patterns on glued-laminated parquet in the palace premises.
The Mikhailovsky Palace was also famed for the salons and musical soirées, held by Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna. Born Princess Helene Charlotte von Württemberg, she married Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich in 1824. A highly educated woman, she was the life and soul of the parties at the Mikhailovsky Palace. Her musical classes paved the way for the foundation of the St Petersburg Conservatoire.
When Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna died in 1873, the Mikhailovsky Palace was inherited by her daughter. Later Tsar Nicholas II decided to acquire the palace for the state and use it to house the Emperor Alexander III Russian Museum. Between 1895 and 1898, Vasily Svinin transformed the Mikhailovsky Palace into a museum.
The Mikhailovsky Palace, the main building of the Russian Museum, is situated on Square of Arts in the centre of the city. The State Russian Museum is the first state museum of Russian Art in the country. It was founded by decree of Tsar Nicholas II in St Petersburg in 1895. The museum solemnly opened its doors to the public on 7/19 March 1898.
Built to the design of the celebrated architect Carlo Rossi between 1819 and 1825, the palace is a masterpiece of Russian Neoclassical architecture. The Palace was named after Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich — the fourth son of Emperor Paul I. In 1895 the building was acquired by the crown and granted to the Emperor Alexander III Russian Museum. In 1895–1898 the inner premises of the palace were rebuilt and adjusted for the museum. The project was made by the architect Vasily Svinin.
The Mikhailovsky Palace, the Benois Wing and the Rossi Wing contain the main museum exposition. They house a permanent display of works by the most prominent Russian artists – Andrei Rublev, Dionysius, Fedot Shubin, Dmitry Levitsky, Vladimir Borovikovsky, Karl Brullov, Fidelio Bruni, Orest Kiprensky, Alexander Ivanov, Ilya Repin, Arkhip Kuindzhi, Ivan Shishkin, Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel, Pavel Antokolsky, Boris Kustodiev, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Pavel Filonov, Marc Chagall and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.
The collection of the Russian Museum numbers 400000 exhibits and covers all historical periods and tendencies of development of Russian art, all its main forms and genres, styles and schools throughout the last 1000 years: from the 10th century to the 21st century.
The Russian museum is a unique depository of art values, a well-known restoration centre, an authoritative academic and research institute, one of the biggest centres of cultural and educational work and academic and methodical centre of museums of art in the Russian Federation, curating the work of 260 Russian museums of art.
The Russian Museum possesses more than five thousand icons. Different schools of icon painting are represented in the exhibition: Novgorodian, Moscovian, Pskovian and other schools, which show the evolution of Old Russian painting.
The oldest icon in the collection of the Russian Museum is The Angel with Golden Hair. It was painted around the very start of the thirteenth century. Who painted the icon and how and when it came to be in a Russian church remains a mystery. The presence of golden threads — symbol of the majesty and immortality of the Olympian gods — betray Greek traditions, the heir to which in the Middle Ages was Byzantium.
The Mother of God of Tenderness of the White Lake is an early-thirteenth-century icon and an extremely rare and ancient work of art. Its iconography — Eleusa or “tenderness” (the Christ child embraces His mother, brushing her cheek with His face) — had been established in Byzantium before the twelfth century. The representations in the margins of the icon date back to an even older tradition.
The St Boris and St Gleb icon (Moscow, mid-14th century) is one of the most striking of medieval monuments in the museum collection. Boris’s deep blue cloak and its red and golden ornamental design shine forth, lending the icon a solemn and festive air. Boris and Gleb were two brothers, the sons of Prince Vladimir, founder of Christianity in Rus. Internecine warfare broke out following his death and both brothers were killed. Boris and Gleb were subsequently revered in Russia as defenders of the faith.
One notable feature of the collection of the Russian Museum is its relatively large number of icons from the north of Russia. Novgorod, Pskov, Vologda, Belozersk and Archangelsk all lie relatively close to St Petersburg and so are well represented in its collection of icons. The Pskovian and и Novgorodian icons of XIII-XV centuries are exhibited in the room. Among them are „St Nicholas“ (Novgorod), „St Demetrios of Soluneia“ (Pskov), „The Archangel Gabriel“ (Pskov), „St Nicholas with scenes from his life“ and others.
The collection of the Russian Museum is particularly rich in icons by such leading Muscovite masters as Andrei Rublev. St Paul the Apostle (circa 1408) and its pendant St Peter the Apostle come from the deisus tier of the Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God in Vladimir. When Rublev painted his icons, he bore in mind that they would be viewed from far below. This explains the absence of details and the clear and concise silhouettes of the figures. The composition’s colour scheme — green-blue clothes on a changing background of yellow and gold — lend it a calm and ceremonial air.
The rather menacing title of one of icon — Saviour Furious Eye (late 14th or early 15th century) — reflects an iconographic type popular among the Old Believers. It emphasised the role of Christ as the judge of mankind. Such icons were popular in Russia during the Time of Troubles, when the Orthodox church split into those faithful to the old canons.
Several icons by Dionysius and his workshop belong to the Russian Museum. The Mother of God Hodigitria (1502–03) originated in the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin in the St Ferapont Monastery.
Aspirations towards dimension, ornamentation and resemblance to reality became more and more apparent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The influence of Western originals (the Piscator Bible) was reflected in works of various schools.
A predilection for three-dimensional painting and the departure from the traditional red and yellow colour scheme were features of the works of Simon Ushakov (The Old Testament Trinity, 1671), an icon-painter of seventeenth century. He worked at the Moscow Armoury, first as a master of silver and then as an icon painter. The works of Simon Ushakov are noted for their depiction of dimension, following the example of the West European masters in his attempt to introduce a direct perspective into the representation.
The end of the seventeenth century and the start of the eighteenth brought major changes to Russian life and culture. Peter the Great turned Russia towards the West and replaced the old religious ideology with a new system of Western values. Peter invited architects, sculptors and painters to Russia from Germany, Holland, France, Italy and other European countries.
The portrait genre – from official to chamber – came to dominate Russian art from Peter’s time. Peter, however, also assisted the development of Russian artists, architects and sculptors. Several of them were accorded the honour of studying in Europe. One such artist sent to study in Italy at the time of Peter the Great was Ivan Nikitin (circa 1680 — after 1741). In 1716, he and his brother Roman travelled to Florence, where he studied at the Academy of Arts. Nikitin’s artistic heritage is small, with very few authentically signed works surviving to this day. One of his best works is Portrait of a Field Hetman (1720s). The name of the subject has likewise never been fully established. Possible candidates for the figure portrayed in Nikitin’s picture are various Ukrainian hetmen and Casimir Jan Sapega, a Polish nobleman who served Russia until his death in 1730.
The icon had dominated for almost seven centuries and had left a deep trace in Russian art. Yet this period also witnessed a break in art consciousness, with new artistic principles laid on traditional ones. It is not surprising that the careers of many masters of this time often underwent dramatic changes.
One such artist was Ivan Vishnyakov (1699–1761), creator of the enchanting and enigmatic portraits of Sarah and William Fairmore. His portrait of Sarah Eleonora Fairmore (1740 — after 1805) is testimony to his undoubted talent and high professionalism.
There is an undoubted proximity here to European portraits. At the same time, the works are slightly maladroit, betraying a primitive purity and inexperience of the newly assimilated devices of oil painting. The traditions of icon-painting, with its one-dimensional treatment of space and economic use of colour, are also apparent in the portraits of William and Sarah Fairmore.
Somewhat later, as in Europe, the portrait became the most popular genre in Russian art. Small chamber portraits and large official representations of the aristocracy of the day and age comprise an interesting and important part of the collection of the Russian Museum. Despite the European orientation and obvious technical merits of the canvases of such masters as Alexei Antropov (1716–1795) and Ivan Argunov (1727–1802), echoes of medieval traditions still linger on in their portraits. Mosaic portraits of Peter I, Catherine II and others were produced at the factory founded by Mikhail Lomonosov in 1754 near St. Petersburg.
The portrait genre found its vivid expression in sculptures of Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli (1675-1744), who was an Italian by birth. In 1716 he was called by Peter I to St. Petersburg to cast cannons and fulfil art work on decorating a new Russian capital. He came to Russia together with his son Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, an architect-to-be. Unsurpassed in filigree technique of performance is his monumental sculptural group Empress Anna Ioannovna with a Negro Boy (1741).
The tapestry The Battle near Poltava is one of the significant and most famous works of the St. Petersburg tapestry manufactory founded on the initiative of Peter I in 1716.
Portraiture was particularly popular in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century. The 1770s and 1780s were the heyday of Fyodor Rokotov (1730s–1808), one of the most delicate and refined portrait painters of this time. The Russian Museum possesses more than forty works by Rokotov. The smoky-grey, pink and soft blue tones, Rokotov’s favourites, went in perfect harmony with Rococo and early Neoclassical interiors.
Several works by sculptors working at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries display a sensual treatment of life, such as Venus (1792) by Feodosius Schedrin (1751–1825).
Dmitry Levitsky (1735–1822) was perhaps Russia’s finest portraitist of the period of Enlightened Neoclassicism. In Portrait of Catherine II the Legislatress, the empress is depicted in the temple of the goddess of Justice. Catherine stands beside a sculptural image of the goddess, dressed as the Legislatress. She burns poppy flowers at the altar, implying sacrifice of her personal quiet in the interests of the national welfare. Instead of a crown, she wears a laurel wreath in her hair. The decorations of the Order of St Vladimir and the books lying at her feet imply the truth and her services to her country.
The sculptor Fedot Shubin (1740–1805), having formed in the North of Russia, Archangelsk, had carried his love to the folk art throughout his life. This is particularly evident in his carvings on bone, for which the Archangel masters were famed. His many sculptural portraits in marble also reveal his skill for working with solid materials and achieving maximum likeness to life. Shubin was not afraid to delve into details, though these do not distract from the main thing in his portraits — the characteristics of his subject. The Russian Museum possesses the world’s most comprehensive collection of works by Shubin. Catherine II the Legislatress (1789), an enormous marble figure, reveals Shubin as a master of allegory and ornamentation. The statue was ordered by Prince Grigory Potemkin for the Tauride Palace. The ageing Empress is depicted redoubtable yet feminine, via the use of allegorical attributes and soft, lyrical characteristics.
Romanticism, born in Russia at the start of the nineteenth century, thus underwent a number of changes, enjoying a relatively long life and combining with other trends and movements. Official portraits came back into fashion in the 1820s. And the king of this genre in the Russian art of the first half of the nineteenth century was without a doubt Karl Brullov (1799–1852). Karl Brullov’s creative heritage contains a considerable number of striking portraits. One of his masterpieces is his unfinished picture of Yulia Samoilova retiring from a ball. It is more than just an official portrait; it is a pictorial symbol, a personification of the masquerade of life, where reality is often hidden from the outside eye.
Karl Brullov, while famed as a portraitist and author of murals for several large cathedrals and churches, is best known in Russia as a history painter. In 1823, Brullov travelled to Italy and set about seeking a theme for a history canvas. The subject of The Last Day of Pompeii — the most important work not only in Brullov’s creativity, but in the whole history of Russian painting — was suggested to him by his elder brother Alexander, an architect who had made sketches of excavations in Pompeii. Brullov spent more than five years working on his masterpiece, painting numerous sketches and several modelli. The Last Day of Pompeii is one of a rare number of completed Russian Romantic projects on an historical subject. Brullov gave bright pictorial form to the theme of tragedy so beloved of the Romantic artists. The main thematic line of the work is the reactions and emotions of the inhabitants of Pompeii at the fateful moment. Resolving it in a major emotional and colourist key, Brullov lends the tragedy a sublime ring.
Hovhannes Aivazovsky (1817–1900) painted a multitude of pictures of the sea — the fruit of his fantasy and imagination, based on personal observations. The collection of the Russian Museum contains some forty canvases by Aivazovsky, from various periods of his life. The Ninth Wave (1850) is one of Aivazovsky’s best pictures and incarnates the Romantic concepts of tragedy, drama and eternal hope in man’s victory over the elements.
The collection of the Russian Museum offers a unique opportuntity to show the whole range of movements, trends and creative searches that existed in the first half of the nineteenth century. Works in the spirit of Neoclassical, Romantic, Realist and other traditions were displayed side by side at exhibitions of the Academy of Arts and, after 1824, at the Society for the Encouragement of Artists.
The works by the professors of the Academy of Arts are displayed in the room, among them exhibits by the painters Grigory Ugryumov (Testing the Strengh of Jan Usmar, 1796), Andrey Ivanov (The Heroism of a Young Kievian, 1810), Fidelio Bruni ( The Brazen Serpent, 1841), and the sculptors Vasily Demut-Malinovsky (Russian Scaevola, 1813) and Piotr Stavasser (Mermaid, 1845).
Like The Last Day of Pompeii, Alexander Ivanov’s Christ’s Appearance to the People was a work epoch-making in Russian art. Ivanov worked on it in Italy for more than thirty years — practically his entire creative lifetime. The artist sought long and hard for these various reactions to the appearance of Christ, painting a multitude of figures, landscapes and compositional studies in the process of work on his canvas. The Russian Museum possesses a large final study of Christ’s Appearance to the People, preceding the picture now hanging in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
As with literature, changes came to the fine arts at the end of the 1840s. Dramatic and sometimes even tragic notes began to increasingly burst through the soft lyrical calm of the social genre. Like Gogol and Dostoyevsky in literature, Pavel Fedotov (1815–1852) opened up the life of the tiers état — the military, civil servants and townsfolk — claiming it for art. The situations depicted by Fedotov cease to be simply an object of description or narration. Almost every “anecdote” has a social subtext. One of his central canvases, The Major Makes a Proposal (circa 1851), versions of which are in the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery, “narrates” with light irony the popular story of the ruined aristocratic officer who attempts to improve his financial position by marrying a merchant’s daughter. She in turn is rewarded with a climb up the social ladder.
In several versions of Young Widow (1851(2?)), Fedotov depicts a drama typical of those years, when soldiers’ wives were often deprived of a roof over their heads and means of subsistence on the death of their spouses.
The art of Fedotov and other genre artists of the 1840s and 1850s forms a specific bridge between the first and second halves of the nineteenth century. Themes of everyday life increasingly became the object of representation in the paintings and sculptures of these years. As before, however, the Academy of Arts continued to orientate artists on mythological, biblical and allegorical subjects, regulating the degree of lifelikeness.
One of the features of the works of the artists of the late nineteenth century was attention to national manifestations in history, life and nature. Artists of those years, like Alexei Savrasov (1830–1897), closely studied local landscapes, revealing previously unnoticed poetry.
Savrasov is considered to be one of the creators of the lyrical landscape. It was he who managed to show in his paintings connection between nature and human’s spiritual life. In the 1870s the artist’s talent flowered to the highest degree. To those times most of his works displayed in the Russian Museum relate. The best landscapes painted in that period are Thaw. Yaroslavl (1874), Spring. View of the Moscow Kremlin (1873), The Flood of the Volga near Yaroslavl (1871). Savrasov influenced a great deal on the Russian landscape painters of the late 19th century – early 20th century. After the master’s death Isaak Levitan told that “Savrasov had created the Russian landscape”.
The disparities between the realities of life and the attempts of the Academy of Arts to idealise it simmered for a number of decades before bursting into the open revolt of a group of students in 1863. They refused to paint examination pictures on mythological themes and demonstratively left the Academy, forming the Artel — Russia’s first ever anti-Academic commercial art association. Its programmer envisaged the reflection of real life in art and it quickly won authority.
Ivan Kramskoi (1837–1887),the organiser of the St. Petersburg Artist’s Artel was the leader of the whole generation of Realist artsits. Working in different genres the artist achieved the most success in portraiture. In his works he portrayed many prominent personalities of the Russian culture. The portraits of the artist Ivan Shishkin (1880), the sculptor Mark Antokolsky (1876), the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (1885) are exhibited in the room.
The portrait of Mina Moiseyev (1882) reflects the artist’s ability to concentrate on the most essential things in a portrait. The peasant’s outer appearance and free and relaxed pose evoke a sense of inner calm and independence. The old, wrinkled face radiates warmth and kindness, reflecting the sitter’s great age and wisdom. This portrait was painted in Siverskaya near St Petersburg.
The art of Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898) extols the Russian forest. After graduating from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Shishkin studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts. He went abroad in 1862 and lived and worked in Düsseldorf. Returning home, he wrote in his diary: “My motto? To be Russian. Long live Russia!”
Shishkin studied nature at great length, aspiring to create an exact lifelike image. Many of his pictures encompass every single detail of nature (Pine Grove, 1898), though this by no means implies primitive naturalism. Among Shishkin’s studies are no small number of genuine masterpieces of the poetic representation of nature (Goutweed. Pargolovo, 1884(5?)). Such pictures as Oaks (1887) and Winter (1890) are lyrical and monumental images of the different states of the Russian landscape.
Vasily Vereschagin (1842–1904) followed his own personal paths in art, ones without precedent in Russian painting. Vereschagin was widely travelled and a witness of many battle scenes. The subjects of his pictures are war and its tragedies (Shipka-Sheynovo. Skobelev at Shipka. Before 1890) and the lives of the peoples of various nations (At the Doors of a Mosque, 1873).
Genre paintings created by the artists of the second part of the 19th century who formed the nucleusof The Society of Travelling Art Exhibitions are displayed in the room. The Society of Travelling Art Exhibitions was created in 1870, existing in Russia for more than four decades. Peredvizhniki was the name given in Russia to the Realist artists who joined the society. Their works were firmly in keeping with the democratic mood of society in those years and the wave of criticism swamping every aspect of life.
The atmosphere of a post-reform village, decay of patriarchal everyday life was shown by Vasily Maksimov (1844–1911) in his work Dividing the Family Property (1876).
The range of genres and themes in the oeuvres of the Peredvizhniki was extremely wide and diverse. The 1860s and 1870s were the years of the activities of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) group, a middle-class organization that sought to fight on behalf of the Russian people. Their attempts to “go to the people”, meetings and acts of terrorism ended in prison, exile and death for many revolutionaries. Not surprisingly, the image of the revolutionary was popular in the democratic art of those years — Convicted Man (1879) by Vladimir Makovsky (1846–1920).
The landscape genre in the painting of the latter half of the nineteenth century was similar to the descriptions of nature in the Russian literature of those years. Artists and writers, however, did not confine themselves to visible reality. They used the state of nature to convey frames of mind and the emotional atmosphere of the surrounding world. Even such pictures as Moscow Courtyard by Vasily Polenov (1844–1927) — the pictorial tale of a little corner of Moscow — are tinged with fresh perception of an everyday subject.
Polenov was not only a landscapist. Like many at this time, he painted pictures on historical and biblical themes (Christ and the Adulteress (Who Is Without Sin?), 1888), as well as genre scenes and landscapes. This syncretism reflected the logical development of the art of the second half of the nineteenth century, with biblical and historical motifs coming to life in a plausible environment. As a young artist influenced by Alexander Ivanov, Vasily Polenov had the idea of “creating not Christ coming, but Christ already come into the world, making his way among the people.” This germ grew during his periods of study at the Imperial Academy of Arts and then abroad, where the first sketches were made in 1873 and 1876. In order to create an historically authentic setting, Polenov travelled across Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Greece in 1881 and 1882 and spent the winter of 1883/84 in Rome, creating many portraits and architectural and landscape studies. The painting was first shown at the fifteenth Travelling Art Exhibition in 1887.
In the room one can see works by the famous sculptor Mark Antokolsky (1843–1902) – Mephistopheles (1883), Nestor-Chronicler (1890), Spinoza, Christ Before the People (1878).
Ilya Repin (1844–1930) was possibly the most famous of the Realist artists, remaining so to this day. All the stages in his career in art are well represented in the Russian Museum.
Repin painted Barge Haulers on the Volga between 1870 and 1873. It came to be regarded as a pictorial emblem of its day and age. Repin simply yet effectively resolved a theme that occupied many in those years — serf labour — uniting almost ten portraits in one composition. He does not confine himself to portraiture alone, though at the same time Barge Haulers on the Volga cannot be called a genre picture. It goes much deeper than a purely group portrait or genre scene. Barge Haulers on the Volga is a metaphor for strength and debility, love of freedom and the attempt to break free from slavery.
The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (1871) was given to final-year students of the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1871 and received the most lifelike and emotional incarnation in the work of Ilya Repin. The artist was at first not particularly inspired by the theme, until he associated it with the death of his sister. Tragedy and sorrow combine with lucidity and hope, enriching the painting with an atmosphere of agitation, expressed in the tense ring of the colours and the lighting contrasts. The sorrowful and deferential hope of the girl’s parents is contrasted to Jesus’ austere solemnity. The painterly culture and spirituality of the young artist’s canvas rank it alongside the leading works of Russian art. The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter was awarded a major gold medal and was acquired by the Imperial Academy of Arts. Repin was rewarded with a trip to France to perfect his art. While in France, he painted Sadko (1876), a picture in the fairytale spirit for which he was elected to the Imperial Academy of Arts.
Ilya Repin painted some of his finest works in the 1880s, including Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880–91), which was only completed in 1891. The sound of different forms of laughter issuing from the painting captures the proud and independent natures of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Zaporozhia was the name of the military and political organization of the Ukrainian Cossacks and their autonomous territory in the south of the country from the mid-sixteenth century to 1775, when the host was officially abolished by Catherine the Great. The Zaporozhian Cossacks gained renown in the late fifteenth century as defenders of the Lithuanian-Ruthenian state against the Crimean Tatars, while living as free brigands in the uncolonised steppe frontier of the Polish state.
In 1675, Sultan Muhammad IV of Turkey allegedly sent the Zaporozhian Cossacks a threatening letter, advising them to surrender “voluntarily and without any resistance.” In response, they composed a sarcastic letter, full of humour and scorn, promising “to fight on land and water.” Inspired by this legend, Ilya Repin made his first sketch for a painting on the subject in 1878. He spent thirteen years working on the picture, studying the history and way of life of the Zaporozhian Host, visiting the Ukraine, collecting folk legends and reading archive documents and history books. The artist masterly conveys the free-loving spirit and daring natures of the Cossacks, headed by Ataman Ivan Sirko. The various images were based on studies of concrete people, whom Repin transformed on canvas. The distinctive drawing and technical mastery contribute to an unusually lifelike scene, reminiscent of the works of Diego Velázquez or Frans Hals.
Of particular importance among works of the 1880s is Repin’s portrait of the composer Anton Rubinstein (1887). Ilya Repin described the composer in a letter to the music and art critic Vladimir Stasov: “Interesting head, like a lion.”
Repin was a talented psychologist who did more than just record the outer appearances of the state elite of his time. He created a whole gallery of highly interesting characteristics of those called upon to decide the fate of Russia. Repin was an artist forever seeking new subjects, themes, images and means of expression. He was never indifferent to events taking place in the country. Pictures such as What an Expanse! (1903) or 17 October 1905 (1907) are witness to Repin’s perception, attention and interest in the new social and political moods sweeping pre-revolutionary Russia.
It became customary for the Peredvizhniki to interpret the history genre in terms of modern reality. Yermak Conquering Siberia (1895) and Suvorov Crossing the Alps in 1799 (1899) by Vasily Surikov (1848–1916) are more like the works of directors, reinterpreting events of old. The majority of Peredvizhniki were drawn to psychologism in the history genre. They read situations through experiences, reactions and the states of mind of their subjects. It is thus perhaps not surprising that the artists of the second half of the nineteenth century who painted historical themes were also fine portraitists.
Suvorov Crossing the Alps in 1799 (1899) was painted in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Suvorov’s campaign. Count Alexander Suvorov (1729–1800) was a Russian fieldmarshal who commanded a Russo-Austrian force in Italy in 1799. Ordered to relieve Russian troops in Switzerland, he famously marched across the Alps. Vasily Surikov specially travelled to Switzerland, painting landscape studies at the historical sites and sliding down the mountains near Interlaken in order to capture the sense of movement. The artist explained his concept: “The most important thing in the picture is the movement. The selfless courage. The men proceed, subordinating to their commander.”
Taking a Snow Town (1891) is the only large picture by Vasily Surikov without historical content. Painted in Krasnoyarsk, it was inspired by the artist’s childhood memories. He portrays an amusing game typically played on the last day of Shrovetide. Surikov’s painting is an expression and celebration of the Russian character.
An interesting aspect of Russian art at the turn of the century was its revival of interest in Russian history. Not only historical subjects, but fairytales, legends and artists’ fantasies on themes from national history also became the subjects of pictures. Knight at the Crossroads (1882) by Victor Vasnetsov (1848–1926) belongs to Russian epos.
Vasnetsov’s painting is a free interpretation of the Russian traditional legend of The Three Journeys of Ilya Muromets. The artist depicts the hero in a moment of reflection, before a stone inscribed with the following words: “If you go straight ahead, there will be no life; there is no way forward for he who travels past, walks past or flies past.” Vasnetsov interprets the legend as a real event, depicting the knight in ethnographically and historically authentic armour and in a natural landscape setting. The artist employs literary devices to contrast the forces of lightness and darkness — the lucid figure of the knight on the white horse, the ominous black raven on the stone, the skull and bones scattered across the steppe. The interpretation of the landscape as the endless Russian plain and the loneliness of the thickset rider on the horse lend an epic ring to the picture.
The Russian Museum owns Repin’s largest picture, Ceremonial Sitting of the State Council on 7 May 1901 Marking the Centenary of its Foundation (1903). It was specially ordered from Repin and hung in one of the halls of the Mariinsky Palace in St Petersburg. This group portrait is composed of more than eighty figures and demanded enormous preparatory work from Repin. He made studies of the majority of members of the State Council, also part of the museum’s collection.
All the members of the State Council and the State Chancellery attended in full-dress uniform. Tsar Nicholas II (1894–1917) and senior members of the Imperial family are flanked by their ministers. Repin painted the scene from behind the chairs on the right (next to the columns).
He rapidly sketched the original modello on a canvas on which the perspective of the hall had already been marked out, working from a previously selected point. The artist later turned this study into a large picture with the help of two students of the Imperial Academy of Arts — Boris Kustodiev and Ivan Kulikov. Every member of the State Council is depicted in natural and diverse poses, with strong physical resemblances.
Дата добавления: 2015-11-04; просмотров: 21 | Нарушение авторских прав
| <== предыдущая лекция | | | следующая лекция ==> |
| | |