Russian Painting. Peter Leek
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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 Songs. Even more heart-rending is his painting entitled Inconsolable Grief (1884), depicting a grieving woman standing beside a wreath of flowers, painted when his own wife was mourning the death of their son.
Vassily Perov, a warm-hearted man whose views commanded respect among his fellow Itinerants, almost invariably shows his models sitting in a quiet and dignified pose. With great subtlety, he conveys the haunted sensitivity of Dostoyevsky, the mental energy of the dramatist Alexander Ostrovsky, and the shrewdness of the merchant Ivan Kamynin – whose family refused to allow this portrait to be exhibited at the World Fair in Paris in 1878 because it did not present a sufficiently congenial image of him. Many of Perov’s liveliest genre paintings, such as Hunters at Rest, A Meal in a Monastery and The Angler, rely on character observation for their lively satire or humour.
Ilya Repin (1844–130) has a style of portraiture that remains very much his own, despite being influenced by both Manet and Velazquez. Among his most enchanting portraits are the ones of his daughters Vera and Nadezhda and the idyllic group portrait On a Turf Bench (1876), all painted en plein air.
Repin was a close friend of Leo Tolstoy. He made numerous paintings and sketches of the novelist, and it is interesting to compare the portrait reproduced here with the one painted by Kramskoï in 1872. An interval of fifteen years separates the two paintings, during which Tolstoy had become increasingly ascetic. No less revealing is Repin’s Portrait of Mussorgsky painted in hospital (hence the dressing-gown) shortly before the composer’s early death, hastened by alcoholism. One of Repin’s most memorable portraits is The Archdeacon (1877), which splendidly conveys the patriarchal robustness of this “lion among the clergy” who, he felt, embodied “the echo of a pagan priest”.
The most demanding official commission undertaken by Repin was a painting of the formal session of the State Council held on 7 May 1901. In order to complete this gigantic group portrait, he prepared dozens of studies so he could accurately capture the character of each of the 100 councillors, and he enlisted the help of two of his pupils, Boris Kustodiev and Ivan Kulikov. The painting was commissioned to celebrate the Council’s centenary – but, whether intentionally or not, Repin succeeded in conveying its aura of implacable conservatism. One critic remarked that he had painted a vision of “Carthage on the eve of destruction”.
Many of the other Itinerants were gifted portrait painters, among them Yuri Leman, Alexeï Kharlamov, Nikolaï Yaroshenko (1846–98) – dubbed “the conscience of the peredvizhniki”, who succeeded Kramskoï as leader of the Itinerants – and Nikolaï Gay, who painted a marvellously expressive self-portrait during the two years preceding his death. The portraiture of two of the most brilliant of the Itinerants, Serov and Surikov, will be discussed in the third part of this book.
49. Alexander Golovin, Portrait of Stage Director Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1917. Tempera on panel, 80 × 67 cm, Theatre Museum, St. Petersburg.