Russian Painting

by Peter. Leek

  Compositions of this kind became increasingly common during the first half of the nineteenth century, stimulated no doubt by the interest in interior design that seized Europe during the post-Napoleonic period. In 1828 Vorobiev was appointed professor of perspective at the Academy. At the same time Venetsianov, as part of his own curriculum, made pupils paint carefully observed interior scenes. Many of these have survived, among them views of the Hermitage and the state rooms of the Winter Palace. Other notable paintings of interiors by Venetsianov’s pupils include Soroka’s The Study in a Country House at Ostrovski, Alexeï Tyranov’s delightful picture of the Chernetsov brothers in their studio (1828), Alexander Denisov’s Sailors at a Cobbler’s (1832), Yevgraf Krendovsky’s Preparations Before the Hunt (1836) and Lavr Plakhov’s Coachmen’s Room at the Academy (1834).

  Venetsianov’s own treatment of interiors underwent a sudden transformation thanks to The Choir of the Church of the Capuchin Monastery on the Piazza Barberini by the French artist François Granet. Venetsianov saw it in the Hermitage in 1820 and was instantly struck with a desire to apply Granet’s treatment of space and light to a vernacular interior. The result was The Threshing Floor, which he painted some months later. In order to get the light and details right, he had one of the end walls of the threshing barn removed. It is interesting to compare this interior with The Kitchen by Yuri Krylov (1805-41), painted five or six years later. It is not known whether Krylov was one of Venetsianov’s pupils, but the mood, attention to detail, and the preoccupation with perspective and light must surely have been influenced by the earlier work.

  104. Alexeï Venetsianov, The Threshing Floor, 1821-23.

  Oil on canvas, 66.5 x 80.5 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

  105. Leondi Solomatkin, Morning at a Tavern, 1873.

  Oil on canvas, 52 x 71 cm, Art Museum of Irskutsk, Irkutsk.

  Genre Painting from the Eighteenth Century to the 1860s

  In the 1770s the Academy offered a class of “domestic exercises”. Scenes from ordinary everyday life however, which came to be known as genre painting, were scarcely considered as worthy topics for art and did not enjoy the same prestige as portraits or historical tableaux. Initially, as with landscape and interiors, Venetsianov’s interest in peasant life was partly responsible for genre painting being viewed as a separate artistic discipline.

  Although, as with other artists, the distinction between Venetsianov’s genre pictures and his other types of painting is sometimes blurred, what sets them apart is the quiet focusing on the men, women and children who appear in these tableaux — on their activities, surroundings, identity and lifestyle. Many of his genre paintings — such as Cleaning the Sugar Beet, Peasant Children in a Field and The Morning of a Landowner’s Wife — capture a “frozen” moment of time. The same is true of the lively medley of people, animals, carts and carriages in Square in a Provincial Town by Yevgraf Krendovsky (1810-53), a wide-angled panorama notable for its ingenious manipulation of perspective.

  One of the first Russian artists to specialize in this type of painting was Mikhaïl Shibanov. A serf of Prince Grigory Potemkin (the favourite of Catherine the Great), he had first-hand knowledge of peasant life. The dates of his birth and death are not known, though he died after 1789. The family that figures in his most famous painting — Peasant Meal, painted in 1774 — is shown gathered round a farmhouse table. It is doubtful whether the Academy had ever previously been asked to consider a work of art that featured ordinary people in a humble domestic setting engaged in a commonplace daily routine. By portraying the dignified solidarity of this peasant family, Shibanov showed that it was possible to produce a masterpiece without painting in the grand manner. The same qualities are apparent in Solemnizing the Wedding Contract, which he painted three years later. There is no distance between Shibanov and the people featured in these pictures. For the first time in the history of Russian art, peasants are treated not as exotic characters or curiosities, but as real people endowed with an aesthetic and moral worth.

  Another artist who left a vivid record of peasant life was L. A. Ermenev. As with Shibanov, we do not know his precise dates, but he was probably born in 1746 and died some time after 1789. The son of an equerry at the court of Catherine the Great, he was orphaned at an early age. After graduating from the Academy, he went to study in Paris. There he witnessed the events of the French Revolution, which deepened his preoccupation with the condition of the lower classes. Ermenev’s paintings have poignant titles — Poor Woman and Her Daughter, Blind Singers, Peasants at Table, Poor Man and Woman, Old Man Seated with a Bowl. Dressed in tatters or patched clothes, often with rheum-filled eyes and with rags on their swollen feet, the serfs and beggars that people his pictures are a far cry from the fashionably attired courtiers who sat for Rokotov, Borovikovsky or Levitsky. Ermenev died alone, unrecognized, and his work was virtually overlooked until after his death.

  106. Illarion Pryanishnikov, The Mockers, 1865.

  Trtiakov Gallery, Moscow.

  107. Pavel Fedotov, The Major’s Marriage Proposal, 1848.

  Oil on canvas, 58.3 x 75.4 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  108. Pavel Fedotov, The Newly Decorated Civil Servant, 1846.

  Oil on canvas, 48.2 x 42.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  109. Vassily Maximov, All in the Past, 1889.

  Oil on canvas, 72 x 93.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  110. Vassily Maximov, The Sick Husband, 1881.

  Oil on canvas, 70.8 x 88.6 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, Russian writers and painters were also beginning to focus attention on other sectors of society that had, until then, scarcely figured in art. Landowners, civil servants, the military and the clergy all became possible subjects for artistic comment. As a reaction against the repressive and bureaucratic regime of Nicholas I, the behaviour of the ruling class was frequently depicted in a satirical light.

  One of the most astute social commentators was Pavel Fedotov. Fedotov’s contemporaries would have immediately recognised the social status of the dramatis personae in his best-known picture — The Major’s Marriage Proposal, painted in 1848. Marriageable young ladies, like the one whose hand the languid major is seeking, could be seen promenading on Saint Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt and in the city’s parks. All the figures, down to the servants in the background, are portrayed with an unerring eye for detail. Fedotov’s art pillories social evils (in this case the way women were treated as marketable chattels), mostly with humour though occasionally with bitterness. In 1844, at the age of twenty-nine, Fedotov abandoned a military career in favour of painting. Eight years later he died in a mental institution, his mental state unbalanced by poverty and frustration.

  Fedotov’s The Newly Decorated Civil Servant infuriated the self-important officials caricatured by him to such an extent that he was banned from selling reproductions until the medal had been removed from the civil servant’s dressing gown and the title changed to The Morning After a Party. His sense of the absurd is keenly evident in works like The Discriminating Bride (1847), A Poor Aristocrat’s Breakfast (1849) and Encore! Encore! (1851-52), which features an army officer desperately trying to relieve the tedium of a rural posting by teaching his dog to jump over a stick. Fedotov’s last paintings have a more sombre atmosphere — such as The Gamblers (1852) and The Young Widow (1851-52), an extremely moving picture inspired by his own sister’s bereavement.

  111. Vassily Pukirev, The Unequal Marriage, 1862.

  Oil on canvas, 173 x 136.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  112. Ilya Repin, On the Turf Bench, 1876.

  Oil on canvas, 36 x 55.5 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

  113. Vassily Perov, Troika (Apprentice Workmen Carrying Water), 1866.

  Oil on canvas, 123.5 x 167.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  114. Vassily Perov, Drowned Girl, 1867.

  Oil on canvas, 68 x 106 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

 
; 115. Ilya Repin, A Ploughman, Leo Tolstoy Ploughing, 1887.

  Oil on cardboard, 27.8 x 40.3 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  116. Vassily Perov, Hunters at Rest, 1871.

  Oil on canvas, 119 x 183 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  117. Ilya Repin, Religious Procession in Kursk Province, 1880-1883.

  Oil on canvas, 175 x 280 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  118. Vassily Maximov, Arrival of a Sorcerer at a Peasant Wedding, 1875.

  Oil on canvas, 116 x 188 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  Genre Painting from the 1860s to the 1890s

  During the first half of the nineteenth century, two currents existed side by side. Painters such as Venetsianov and Shibanov expressed aspects of everyday life in Russia in a good-natured way without the least criticism, while others, such as Fedotov and Ermenev, laid the foundations of Critical Realism, which directly or by implication commented on social and moral issues. The Itinerants and other painters active during the second half of the century built on these foundations, providing a vivid record of the reality of people’s lives.

  One painter who would have appreciated Fedotov’s The Artist Who Married Without a Dowry Relying on his Talent was Vassily Pukirev, whose dramatic painting The Unequal Marriage had an autobiographical basis. The parents of the girl he loved had made her marry an elderly general, since they did not regard painting as an eligible career. Pukirev himself figures in the congregation, standing unhappily, with arms crossed, behind the reluctant bride. This painting, which was to enjoy enormous popularity, made its debut in September 1863 at the same exhibition as Nikolaï Gay’s The Last Supper. Together they heralded a much freer and more innovative approach to academic art.

  Like Fedotov and Pukirev, Nikolaï Nevrev had a sharp eye for pretence. In Bargaining: A Daily Scene in the Serfdom Era (From the Recent Past) the object of derision is a landowner selling a pretty serf to cover his debts. The anachronism and obscenity of serfdom is underlined by the “civilized” surroundings in which the deal is being struck. Leonid Solomatkin was a less overt moralist, but in many of his paintings comedy has a mordant edge — as can be seen from Morning at a Tavern and the grotesque jollity of The Wedding (1872).

  119. Grigory Miasoyedov, The Zemstov is Dining, 1872.

  Oil on canvas, 74 x 125 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  The Mockers by Illarion Pryanishnikov, in which merchants and their affluent customers laugh at a dancing beggar, was based on a scene from a play by Alexander Ostrovsky. In The Zemstvo is Dining by Grigory Miasoyedov the contrast between rich and poor is more oblique in pictorial terms, though no less obvious. The peasants are obliged to eat their frugal lunch outside, while decanters and washing-up glimpsed through the window reveal that the more affluent members of the zemstvo (rural district council) have been banqueting in the council chamber.

  The prime concern of many artists of this period, both Itinerants and non-Itinerants, was to convey the reality of people’s lives. Vassily Maximov grew up in a village and spent much of his adult life in rural Russia, different aspects of which are portrayed in paintings such as Arrival of the Sorcerer at a Peasant Wedding, The Sick Husband and All in the Past. In the paintings of Konstantin Savitsky, often people en masse — rather than individuals — are the heroes, as in Repairing the Railway and Off to War!.

  Vladimir Makovsky was equally adept at portraying crowds of people, as in Bank Crash and A Doss-House (1889), even though these and most of his other canvases are half the size of Savitsky’s Off to War. Both urban and village life figure in his paintings. The best ones, such as In the Doctor’s Waiting Room and On the Boulevard, or The Rendez-Vous (1883) and Declaration of Love (1889-91), quietly capture fleeting moments from people’s lives. The unevenness of Makovsky’s work led Benois to describe his art as “cold” and “heartless”, while Dostoyevsky enthusiastically praised his “love of humanity”.

  Perov’s genre works range from comedy to tragedy. In The Last Farewell the bowed and huddled figures accompanying the coffin on the sledge poignantly convey the harshness of life. In The Drowned Girl the stillness of the two figures, alone in the riverside dawn, is no less expressive. In contrast to these sombre sentiments are the hilarity of pictures such as Hunters at Rest and the whimsicality (barely masking anticlerical satire) of Easter Procession in the Country, in which the joy of Easter is marred by the weather and the drunkenness of the priests.

  Pryanishnikov faithfully captured the atmosphere of a rather more normal religious procession, but Repin’s Religious Procession in Kursk Province — on which he worked from 1880 to 1883 — represents a totally different level of artistic achievement. The woman holding a miraculous icon, the mounted police and stewards, the merchants, shopkeepers, peasants, clergy, beggars, cripples, children… everyone is carefully characterised, creating a multifaceted image of provincial Russia, or even of Russia as a whole. Thanks to the masterly use of perspective, the whole procession seems to be moving steadily forward and to be imbued with life.

  120. Vladimir Makovsky, In the Doctor’s Waiting Room, 1870.

  Oil on canvas, 69.4 x 85.3 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  121. Victor Vasnetov, Players, 1879.

  Oil on canvas, 84 x 136 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  122. Vassily Perov, Easter Procession in the Country, 1861.

  Oil on canvas, 71.5 x 89 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  123. Arkady Plastov, Haymaking, 1945.

  Oil on canvas, 193 x 232 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  The use of perspective and composition is no less important in Barge Haulers on the Volga — often called The Volga Boatmen — which Repin painted between 1870 and 1873, while still in his late twenties. Its power and immediacy made it one of the most widely known paintings in Russia and inspired a flood of Realist pictures with contemporary themes. Repin wrote that the choice and use of colour “should express the mood of a painting, its spirit… Like a chord in music.” The bright colour scheme and harsh shadows, the facial expressions of the haulers, their strength and exertion express both the human dignity of their labour and its inhuman demands.

  The variety of Repin’s genre painting and his gift for characterization can be seen from Vechornitsy (Ukrainian Peasant Gathering), Reading for an Examination and Seeing Off a Recruit. In They Did Not Expect Him — started in 1884 and completed in 1888 — Repin makes marvellous use of his talent for drama.

  As a result of the revolutionary movement that culminated in the assassination of Alexander II, hundreds of political suspects were imprisoned or deported to Siberia. In 1883 the new tsar, Alexander III, declared an amnesty for political offenders. The drama of They Did Not Expect Him lies partly in the reactions of the family to the “returnee”, partly in his own anxiety about how they and others will react to his return, and partly in the intrusion of nightmarish reality into a seemingly untroubled domestic scene.

  124. Arkady Plastov, Threshing on the Collective Farm, 1949.

  Oil on canvas, 200 x 382 cm, Museum of Russian Art, Kiev.

  The Post-Revolutionary Period: the life of the People

  The “life of the workers, the peasantry, and the heroes of labour” was to become the great theme of Soviet art. But it had also been the dominant preoccupation of the Itinerants — especially the “young peredvizhniki”, such as Abraham Arkhipov, Nikolaï Kasatkin and Sergeï Ivanov.

  The last decade or so of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of what was known as the “eventless genre” — pictures that expressed the underlying significance or nuances of a situation, without any narrative element or the implication of any causative event. Arguably, the ultimate “eventless” picture was a scene of bored bourgeois domesticity by Baksheyev entitled The Humdrum of Life (1893). One of the most famous was Arkhipov’s Down the Oki (1889) — depicting a group of peasants afloat on a river on a sunny day — which conveys an overwhelming feeling of time standing still. But the “eventless genre” could express the joys and
pains of life as well as its existential quality. Arkhipov’s Visiting portrays the simple pleasure of spending time with friends, while the priests who demurely savour an afternoon out in Kustodiev’s Moscow Teahouse illustrate his satirical vein and sense of fun.

  In utter contrast to these, Arkhipov’s Laundresses is a powerful indictment of the grinding drudgery of manual labour. Concern with the living and working conditions of peasants and industrial workers was voiced in the works of many of his contemporaries. Kasatkin, for example, lived for several months in a coal-mining region, and many of his pictures depict the rigours of the miners’ existence. Sergeï Ivanov’s On the Road: The Death of a Migrant Peasant focused on the plight of agricultural workers in the later part of the nineteenth century. The desperate state of the economy had resulted in thousands of peasants leaving their home villages in search of work. The dead man lying in bright sunshine in the middle of nowhere, his prostrate wife and their bewildered child are powerful symbols of the cruel struggle for survival.

  125. Ilya Repin, Vechornisty (Ukrainian Peasant Gathering), 1881.

  Oil on canvas, 116 x 186 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  126. Konstantin Savitsky, Repairing the Railway, 1874.

  Oil on canvas, 100 x 175 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  127. Abraham Arkhipov, Laundry Workers, late 1890s.

  Oil on canvas, 91 x 70 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

  128. Abraham Arkhipov, Visiting, 1915.

  Oil on canvas, 105 x 154 cm,

  Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

  The dignity of peasant life, its closeness to nature and its serenity and vigour have been recurring themes in Russian art since the time of Venetsianov. The peasants who feature in the paintings of Serebriakova, Goncharova and Plastov are, in a sense, the descendants of Venetsianov’s sowers and reapers. In terms of imagery, among the most remarkable representations of peasant women are Philip Maliavin’s dancing peasant girls, almost lost amid the frenzied swirls of colour. Maliavin’s dancers, in the words of Dmitri Sarabianov, were seen by his contemporaries “as a symbol of the elemental force of the peasantry which exploded at the time of the Revolution”. No less memorable are the harmonious, rhythmic colours of Woman Sleeping in a Sheepfold by Pavel Kuznetsov, many of whose paintings convey the freedom and fascination with the nomadic world of the steppes.