Romantic Painting in other European Countries

 

RUSSIA

A link between Russia and the pacesetting centers of European history painting was formed by Karl Pavlovic Brullow (1799-1852). With The Last Day of Pompeii Brullow created a melodramatic, apocalyptic vision that was enthusiastically described by Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) and Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), who, like many of their countrymen, saw the painting as at long last bringing Russian art up to international standards. While Romantic reverberations were felt in the work of Alexei Venetsianov (1780—1847) and Alexandr Ivanov (1806-1852), Russian painting as a whole, apart from historical themes, soon turned to a naturalistic depiction of everyday life, which occasionally had emotional and sometimes even sentimental traits without really striving for a Romantic liberation of individual feeling.
 

Alexei Venetsianov

(b Moscow, 18 Feb 1780; d Safonkovo, 16 Dec 1847). Russian painter, printmaker and teacher. The son of a reasonably well-to-do merchant, he studied in a private boarding-school in Moscow. He worked as a draughtsman in Moscow and then as a land surveyor in St Petersburg, where he probably studied with the portraitist Vladimir Borovikovsky in the first decade of the 19th century. However, he received no formal training. In 1808 he made several etchings for the Zhurnal karikatur, a satirical publication he hoped to bring out regularly; but they were banned by the censor and destroyed. In the first two decades of the 19th century Venetsianov was active primarily as a portrait painter, often working in pastel. His early portraits can be sentimental and romantic, but later ones are marked by simplicity and authenticity and succeed in conveying both the character of the model and nature of his or her usual surroundings.
 

Alexei Venetsianov
Self-Portrait

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Russian Peasant woman

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Cartomancy

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Peasant Girl

 

Alexei Venetsianov
The Morning of a Landlady

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Ploughing in Spring

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Peasant Child
 

Alexei Venetsianov
Diana Dressing

Alexei Venetsianov
Bathers

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Bathers

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Milk Woman

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Sleeping Shepherd

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Harvesting. Summer

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Reapers

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Zakharka
1825

 

Alexei Venetsianov
A Peasant Girl with a Calf
1820

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Spinner
1820

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Girl with the Cornflowers
1820

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Wet-Nurse with a Child
1830

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Portrait of Artist's wyfe

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Reaper

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Barn Floor
1821-23

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Girl in a Kerchief

 

Alexei Venetsianov
Harvesting

Alexandr Ivanov

(b St Petersburg, 28 July 1806; d St Petersburg, 15 July 1858). Russian painter. He was the foremost religious painter in 19th-century Russia. While maintaining the traditions of his academic mentors, including his father Andrey Ivanov (c. 1772–1848), a history painter of some merit, and Aleksey Yegorov (1776–1851), Ivanov also investigated new formal resolutions that have been compared to those of Cézanne and Mikhail Vrubel’. Ivanov trained at the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, from 1817 to 1828, first as an external student and subsequently full-time, receiving a gold medal for his Joseph Interpreting the Dreams of his Fellow Prisoners, a Wine Merchant and a Caterer (St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.). In 1830 he received a scholarship from the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts to study abroad, and from 1830 to 1857 he lived in Italy, at that time full of Russian artists studying under the auspices of the St Petersburg Academy of Arts or the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, two august institutions that looked askance at innovative tendencies and urged their pensionnaires to uphold the classical tradition.
 

Alexandr Ivanov
Christ Appears to the People
1837-1857
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow