Russian Painting. Peter Leek
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Название: Russian Painting
Автор: Peter Leek
Издательство: Parkstone International Publishing
Жанр: Иностранные языки
Серия: Temporis
isbn: 978-1-78310-750-6, 978-1-78042-975-5
isbn:
The career of Vassily Tropinin was very different from Kiprensky’s. Born a serf, he was given to Count Morkov as part of his wife’s dowry and spent the first part of his life on the Count’s estate in the Ukraine. When Morkov discovered that Tropinin possessed artistic ability, he used him to make copies of famous works of art and also to paint portraits of his family. In 1799 Morkov sent Tropinin to Saint Petersburg to train as a pastry-cook. Tropinin seized the opportunity to attend classes at the Academy, at first secretly and then with Morkov’s approval. But in 1804, Morkov recalled him to the Ukraine to continue working on his estate, both as a servant and as an artist. Eventually, in 1823 – when he was nearly forty-eight – Morkov granted Tropinin his freedom.
The following year Tropinin received the title of academician and moved to Moscow, where he painted portraits of celebrities (including Pushkin and Karamzin) and numerous foreign visitors. In the 1820s he began painting “genre portraits” depicting women at work, with titles such as Lacemaker, Spinner and Embroidress, which are remarkable for their realism and directness. Masterpieces from the later part of his life include his refreshingly unaffected portrait of the writer Varvara Lizogub, and one of his most memorable works is the very natural portrait of his own son painted in 1818.
Like Tropinin, Alexeï Venetsianov was in his true element when painting ordinary people. The quiet realism of his work represented an important step in the development of Russian painting and had a clearly discernible influence for several decades. Until the age of thirty-nine, Venetsianov worked as a draughtsman and land surveyor in the civil service. After taking up residence in Saint Petersburg in 1802, he studied with Borovikovsky and ran a newspaper advertisement offering his services as a portrait painter. In 1811 he received a distinction from the Academy for his self-portrait, which rivals Chardin’s for its frankness, and it was for a portrait of Golovachevsky (one of the professors) that he was nominated as an academician. Nevertheless, in March 1823 he decided to devote his energies primarily to genre painting, and wrote “Venetsianov hereby relinquishes his portrait painting” on the back of a portrait he had just completed.
40. Karl Briullov, Self-Portrait, 1848. Oil on board, 64 × 54 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
41. Ilya Repin, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, 1887. Oil on canvas, 124 × 88 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
42. Ilya Repin, Portrait of Modest Moussorgski, 1881. Oil on canvas, 69 × 57 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
43. Ilya Repin, Autumn Bouquet: Portrait of Vera Repina, the Artist’s Daughter, 1892. Oil on canvas, 111 × 65 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
With, Venetsianov, however, the distinction between portraiture and genre painting is often blurred, as can be seen from his Girl with a Birch-Bark Jar and Reaper, both painted after 1823. And, he clearly did not take his “relinquishment” of portraiture very seriously, since he afterwards painted affectionate portraits of his wife, daughter and young serfs and peasants – including a series in which he portrayed various peasant girls with face and hair framed by a shawl. In 1834 he painted a portrait of Gogol, whose progressive ideas he greatly admired.
Venetsianov’s declared aim was “to depict nothing in any way different from how it appears in nature… without recourse to the style of any other artist, that is, not to paint à la Rembrandt, à la Rubens and so forth, but simply, so to speak, à la Nature”. In 1819 he resigned from the civil service and went to live at Safonkovo, the country estate to the east of Moscow that he had bought a few years earlier. At Safonkovo, he started teaching some of his neighbours and their serfs to paint. In the end, more than seventy pupils had absorbed his approach to art, including several who became popular teachers and transmitted his ideas to the next generation.
Among Venetsianov’s contemporaries, the most popular Russian portrait painter was undoubtedly Karl Briullov, whose fashionable clients in Rome and Saint Petersburg were very different from the shepherds and dairymaids that sat for Venetsianov in Safonkovo. Briullov was taught to paint by his father, a Huguenot woodcarver, before going to the preparatory school of the Academy at the age of ten. Then in 1822 he was awarded a grant which enabled him to travel to Italy, where he stayed until 1835. Briullov’s portraits from the 1820s are unmistakably Romantic in spirit, and some of his outdoor portraits from that period, such as his watercolour of Cyril and Maria Naryshkin, have an Italian setting. In 1827 he painted one of his most delightful and best known works, a picture of a girl gathering grapes (intended as part of a series of genre portraits), to which he gave the title Italian Midday.
Towards the end of the 1820s and during the 1830s he produced increasingly large and elaborate compositions, such as The Portrait of the Artist with Baroness Yekaterina Meller-Zakomelskaya and her Daughter in a Boat.
As Briullov’s art developed, his style evolved beyond Romanticism. His portraits began to exhibit more psychological preoccupations, often giving the impression of being unaffected and placing a greater emphasis on the sitter’s personality. The ultimate development of his style can be seen in the remarkable self-portrait that he painted in 1848.
44. Ivan Kramskoï, The inconsolable Grief, 1884. Oil on canvas, 228 × 141 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
45. Ilya Repin, Archidiacre, 1877. Oil on canvas, 124 × 96 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
46. Ilya Repin, Portrait of Pavel Tretyakov, 1883. Oil on canvas, 98 × 75.8 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
47. Vassily Surikov, Man with an Injured Arm, 1913. Oil on canvas, 68.5 × 53.9 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
48. Valentin Serov, Portrait of the Artist Isaac Levitan, 1893. Oil on canvas, 82 × 86 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
From the 1860s to the 1890s
The most prominent role in setting up the artists’ cooperative was played by Ivan Kramskoï, who had also been a leading member of the “Revolt of the Fourteen”. Although initially drawn to historical and genre painting, he found his fullest expression as a portrait painter. Among the gallery of celebrities who appear in his paintings are fellow-Itinerant Ivan Shishkin – pictured against a backdrop of trees surveying the landscape before setting up his easel – and the singer Elizaveta Lavrovskaya (1879) on the stage of a concert hall, receiving an ovation. His portrait of the forty-four-year-old Leo Tolstoy, who sat for him while writing Anna Karenina, focuses on the thoughtful intensity of the novelist’s gaze. Kramskoï’s portrait of Nikolaï Nekrasov, painted during the poet’s harrowing final illness, shows the poet courageously attempting to finish his Last СКАЧАТЬ