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Girl with Peaches. Portrait of Vera Mamontova, 1887.

Oil on canvas, 91 × 85 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Portico with a Balustrade, 1903.

Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 63 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

To assess the creative endeavour of a major artist is to ask what makes him great, what is his main contribution to art? The answers to that question may vary widely. Some artists discover new facets of life, facets previously inaccessible to art. Others develop an entirely new approach to the painting of their time and blaze a trail to new painterly techniques. Still others consummate a whole trend in the evolution of art. Valentin Alexandrovich Serov, who stands apart in the Russian painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was all three – a great reformer, a pace-setter, and an artist who linked two important periods in Russian painting.

Serov began his career in the 1880s, when the realist artists of the Society for Circulating Art Exhibitions were at the pinnacle of their success. His first officially exhibited pictures, Girl with Peaches and Sunlit Girl, were done in 1887–1888. Several years earlier, his teacher Ilya Repin, an active member of the Society, had displayed his Religious Procession in Kursk Province, followed by the canvases They Did Not Expect Him and Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan. The foremost Russian history painter of the time, Vasily Surikov, completed his most outstanding creation, Boyarina Morozova, in the same year that Serov produced his Girl with Peaches.

When, on the other hand, the artist was painting his last masterpieces, The Rape of Europa and Odysseus and Nausicaa, Russian art was striving, not to recreate real-life scenes, but to paraphrase life, seeing in the artistic image a self-sustained artistic reality. It was now concerned not so much with analysing the relationship between man and society as with finding a new symbolism, a new mythology, and poetry to reflect the modern world.

This transition to a new set of creative principles that were to become the cornerstone of 20th-century art spanned the end of the 19th and the dawn of the 20th century, and Serov was fated to be the artist who carried that transition through. It can even be said that the road travelled by Russian art in the course of twenty-five years – from the late 1880s to the early 1910s – was the road from Girl with Peaches to the Portrait of Ida Lvovna Rubinstein.

Without violating any of his teachers’ traditions, the young artist initiated a new method which was to evolve further in the work of most of the artists of his generation. On that road he was sometimes overtaken and even outstripped by others. When this happened, Serov would size up those who had forged ahead, evaluating them soberly, often sceptically. But the scepticism would pass, and he would feel obliged to take up his brush again to keep from falling behind the times. Serov did not want to stand in anyone’s way; he was deeply conscious of his duty to Russian painting, to his school, his teachers, and his pupils. He spurned the privileges usually accorded to a master. He was no master, he was a toiler; in fact, to a certain degree, he was even a pupil. It was by dint of great effort that he lived up to his role as a leader. Serov was an artist who honed his extraordinary talent on the whetstone of prodigious industry.

Serov was not alone in his search for new trends in art. His life was marked by a long-standing friendship with Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Korovin, Alexander Benois, and other artists from the World of Art group. With many of them he shared common creative interests. This is especially true of Vrubel, with whom the artist was closely associated in his youth.

Winter in Abramtsevo. The Church (study), 1886.

Oil on canvas, 20 × 15.5 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Pond in Abramtsevo (study), 1886.

Oil on wood, 34.5 × 24.5 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Autumn Evening. Domotkanovo, 1886.

Oil on canvas, 54 × 71 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

The two studied together and collectively dreamed of steering new courses in art. Their aspirations, however, did not entirely coincide. Vrubel broke with the traditions of the Itinerants and made an abrupt and unhesitating turn in another direction – to Symbolism, to a new style of painting, thereby dooming himself to temporary isolation. Vrubel developed rapidly, changing to another manner with the resolve of a genius, a true revolutionary in art. Serov, on the other hand, proceeded cautiously, weighing every step along the difficult road ahead before finally combining the old with the new.

Konstantin Korovin was a close friend of Serov’s in the 1880s and 1890s, and at the beginning of the 20th century he became his colleague on the staff of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. To the end of his days, though, Korovin never once stepped beyond the principles that he and Serov had evolved together. This was not the case with Serov, who outgrew these principles and went on to new discoveries.

The very juxtaposition of the three names, Vrubel, Serov, and Korovin – artists who, though bound by ties of friendship, were extremely dissimilar in their creative aspirations – reveals the complexity of Russia’s art scene at the turn of the century. Their various paths of development do not sufficiently reflect all the diversity of trends or personalities involved. Serov’s teacher Repin, after achieving unqualified success in the 1880s, attained new heights in the early 1900s with his huge group portrait of The State Council in Formal Session and a series of brilliant studies for it.

In the 1890s, landscape painting reached its zenith in the works of the Itinerants, with Isaac Levitan summing up its evolution, as it were, and at the same time opening new horizons in the art of painting. This was also a time when new trends and groups began to crop up and either coexisted or replaced one another; the World of Art, for example, was followed by the Blue Rose group and later by the Jack of Diamonds group. All these activities chronologically coincided with the creative endeavour of Serov.

It was a versatile endeavour in that its various component parts shared an affinity with one trend or another. Above all, the Moscow painters who began their move towards Impressionism back in the 1880s admired his early sunlit canvases, his rural landscapes of the 1890s, his ability to see the poetic side of unpretentious, everyday phenomena, and to perceive beauty in the common place.

At times Serov’s art closely resembled that of another group of Moscow painters, nicknamed the junior Itinerants. Continuing in the realist traditions of the 1870s and 1880s, these artists, each in his own way, diversified their painting either by turning to modern themes and heroes, as did Nikolai Kasatkin and Sergei Korovin, or by perfecting their painting techniques. Sergei Ivanov, for instance, lent expressiveness to his images through composition, precise draftsmanship, and subtle colour gradations. Abram Arkhipov integrated genre and landscape painting into contemplative, lyrical compositions: his peasant scenes are devoid of conflict or human collisions, reflecting the beauty of everyday life – a beauty perceived by the artist where others had never even sought it. It is this quality that particularly impressed Serov.

Old Bath-House in Domotkanovo, 1888.

Oil on canvas, 76.5 × 60.8 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

St Mark Square in Venice (study), 1887.

Oil on canvas, 22 × 31 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice (study), 1887.

Oil on canvas, 22.5 × 31.5 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Overgrown Pond. Domotkanovo, 1888.

Oil on canvas, 70.5 × 89.2 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Sunlit Girl. Portrait of Maria Simonovich, 1888.

Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 71 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Other facets of Serov’s art link him with other lines of development in the Russian painting of those years. In the late 1890s, Repin’s pupils in the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, particularly Boris Kustodiev and Philip Maliavin, emulated their teacher, and they cultivated a free painterly manner and a sweeping, resolute brushstroke that set the stage for the decorative trend in early 20th-century painting. This was the style seemingly adopted by the Serov of the 1890s and early 1900s, who enriched it with his own striking individuality.

Serov joined the World of Art group when it was created in the late 1890s, and soon gained undisputed authority among its members. What united them all was a predilection for style, monumental scope, and consummate craftsmanship.

Serov’s art was an organic blend of tradition and innovation. That is why those who cherished the traditions of 19th-century Russian painting were gratified by his deeply realistic, at times almost Repinesque, approach to portraiture. As for the innovators, they accepted him as one of their own because he constantly sought that which had yet to be achieved. These two facets of Serov’s work do not, however, indicate any eclecticism on his part. He was a versatile artist because he stood at the intersection of differing trends, because at that decisive turning-point in the evolution of art, he did not forget the heritage of the past and tried to utilise that heritage, to lend it new life and give it a new interpretation.

It is precisely this addressing himself “to all” that made Serov the leader of an art trend, a scrupulous guardian of the interests of true art, and an artist who championed the new without discarding the old, thus easing the way for others. In this lies the secret of the role played by Serov as leader of the Moscow school of painting. Among his pupils at the Moscow Art School were such dissimilar masters as Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Nikolai Ulyanov, Pavel Kuznetsov, Martiros Saryan, Ilya Mashkov, Mikhail Larionov, and Konstantin Yuon. Each could profit by Serov’s experience, his wise advice, his example, and his characteristic awareness of an artist’s lofty mission.

Serov was immersed in an artistic environment from childhood. He was born in 1865 into the family of a famous Russian composer and music critic. His mother was also a composer and a pianist. Sharing the democratic ideals of the revolutionary writers of the 1860s, Chernyshevsky and Nikolay Dobrolyubov, she worked hard to popularise musical culture among the masses.

Until 1871, when his father died, the Serovs’ apartment in St Petersburg was a popular meeting place for famous painters and sculptors – Nikolai Ge, Mark Antokolsky, and Ilya Repin. These contacts continued abroad too.

Serov began to draw and to take drawing lessons at a very early age – first in Munich, where the family went after his father’s death, then in Paris, where, on Antokolsky’s advice, he was “delivered into the hands” of Repin, who not only taught, but also befriended his young colleague. Repin was in France at the time on a postgraduate assignment from the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, and Serov began attending his studio. Repin made the boy draw from gypsum models and paint in colour from nature.

Portrait of Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, 1893.

Oil on canvas, 60 × 49 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Self Portrait, 1901.

Watercolour and gouache on paper, 49 × 35 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

On the family’s return to Russia in 1875, Serov’s studies with Repin were broken off. They were renewed after a few years, in 1878, when Repin settled in Moscow, and became especially serious and systematic. Several sketches have survived which show how the teacher strove to foster a painter’s spontaneous perception of nature in his pupil by training his hand and eye to capture various objects differing in form, texture, or colour on canvas. Repin did not attempt to mould Serov’s talent with a system of forcible rules. Serov simply worked side by side with Repin; he would often sit near his teacher and watch him paint. At times they worked on one and the same model.

Repin was doing several large compositions at the time and Serov assisted him in those ventures. He drew the barn that can be seen in the background of Repin’s Send-off of Recruit, painted an oil portrait of the famous hunchback, one of Repin’s favourite models and the central figure in his Religious Procession in Kursk Province. Finally, in 1880, Serov accompanied his teacher to Zaporozhye to gather material for the Zaporozhye Cossacks and did many pencil sketches of typical local scenes with Repin.

Soon, however, their joint work came to an end. Repin concluded that he had nothing more to offer to the young Serov and decided to send him on to the St Petersburg Academy, to Pavel Chistiakov. The latter, in the opinion of many contemporaries, was the only man in the Academy capable of teaching a novice the basic principles of art.

Serov enrolled in the Academy in 1880. This was the beginning of an eventful existence for him: studies in the Academy, painting together with Vrubel and Derviz, his fellow pupils from Chistiakov’s class, in a jointly rented studio, and discussing art and its mission during evenings spent at the house of his maternal aunt, Adelaida Simonovich, an educationist and advocate of kindergartens in Russia; Serov maintained a long-standing friendship with her daughters.

Chistiakov was a brilliant and systematic interpreter and teacher of the laws of form in painting and drawing. He tried to show his pupils how the three-dimensional world can be transformed on a two-dimensional piece of canvas into an artistic phenomenon. He instilled in Serov the strict, demanding, and loving attitude to professional skill that was to become the bedrock of Serov’s art.

The young student worked tirelessly. He painted nude models, his friends, scenes of nature – in a word, everything that surrounded him. He devoted much effort to the perfection of his drawing, combining the strict, constructive system of draftsmanship taught by Chistiakov with the pictorial quality of Repin’s graphic works. Serov’s self-portrait of 1885 was an attempt to create an artistic image through the expressiveness of line and hatching. The barely designated figure, the white background, and the dense shading around the head conspire to focus the viewer’s attention on the face. The meaningful expression in the eyes, where one reads a far from youthful self-discipline, a deep concentration, estrangement, and withdrawal into himself, but above all the power of a unique mind and a somewhat precocious spiritual maturity, reflects not only the young Serov’s inner world but also his awareness of what it means to be a creative artist.

Portrait of the Singer Angelo Mazini, 1890.

Oil on canvas, 89 × 70 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Portrait of Konstantin Korovin, 1891.

Oil on canvas, 111.2 × 89 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Portrait of Ivan Zabelin, 1892.

Oil on canvas, 80 × 67 cm.

The State Historical Museum, Moscow.

Portrait of Nikolai Semionovich Leskov, 1894.

Oil on canvas, 64 × 53 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

The rigid formality that prevailed in the Academy was alien to Serov, and the only consideration that kept him from resigning was his faith in Chistiakov. He was extremely critical of the established system of teaching. In a letter to his fiancée (1885) he wrote: “I am very happy to be able to disregard their medals (you have no idea how pernicious are all these stratagems, all this chasing after medals). I can work on my own in any way I please, entrusting myself only to Repin and Chistiakov.”

The first flowering of Serov’s talent relates to the 1880s. Such an early rise to the top is almost unparalleled in the history of art. The two works that brought Serov into the limelight, Girl with Peaches and Sunlit Girl, were painted when he had barely turned twenty. The master later spoke of them with special affection and, according to Igor Grabar, considered these early canvases unexcelled by any of his subsequent works. This was, of course, an exaggeration, but one has to admit that Serov’s Girls were imbued with an absolutely unique quality, one that the artist never captured again. The period when Serov was carefree and happy, searching for and painting “only the joys of life”, did not last long.

These were Serov’s words, and in recent times they have come to define an entire school of Russian, and especially Moscow, painting. The early Korovin was a typical representative of this school; in the 1880s a joyful perception of nature came to characterise the art of Levitan; a tender lyricism marks the early paintings of Arkhipov and Alexei Stepanov, also of the Moscow school. All these artists sought to divorce their art from preconceived notions, from an analytical approach to life. Lyricism was becoming the main tendency in Moscow painting, and Serov with his program of the “joys of life” was its most consistent spokesman.

Of course, the common objectives pursued by the new generation of artists cannot alone explain the creation of Serov’s early masterpieces. An exceptional sequence of events had to occur for them to have been produced at all. Serov left the Academy, and this filled him with an exhilarating sense of freedom from all manner of rules and regulations. He went abroad, and there saw for himself the unfading beauty of the Old Masters, forever succumbing to their irresistible influence.

His absorption with the painting of the great Dutchmen, Spaniards, and Italians bred in Serov a desire to portray the beauty of man and express a love of life. At the same time the young artist began paying more and more attention to the problem of skill, to the “high craftsmanship” that characterised the Old Masters. Venice, with its divine architecture and fairy-tale canals, simply went to Serov’s head. He felt himself at the height of his powers. He was surrounded by friends and loved ones. Finally, he had recently, in 1885, done an inconspicuous little study in Odessa entitled Bullocks: the harmony achieved in the colour scheme of that piece filled him with satisfaction and led him to understand what an artist should aspire to.

Portrait of Maria Lvova, 1895.

Oil on canvas, 87 × 58 cm.

Private collection.

Alexander Pushkin on a Park Bench, 1899.

Graphite, watercolour, and whitewash on paper, 35 × 29.3 cm.

All-Russian Pushkin Museum, St Petersburg.

Also conducive to the young artist’s joyful mood was the environment he moved in, the friends he associated with, and the creative atmosphere that prevailed in Abramtsevo, the country estate of Savva Mamontov, the famous patron of the arts. This remarkable house in the picturesque Moscow countryside was where many innovations in late 19th-century art were conceived. Serov had stayed here with the Mamontov family for long periods as a child; it was an ideal place for bringing his outstanding talents into play. Amateur theatricals were a favourite pastime in Abramtsevo, and Serov himself played a variety of roles. Under the benevolent guidance of his elders – Repin, Victor Vasnetsov, Vasily Polenov – and the beneficial influence of communion with his coevals – Vrubel, Korovin, Mikhail Nesterov – the young Serov’s gift for painting blossomed and matured. It was also here that he came to love the central Russian landscape, the rural scene, the homely peasant horses, and the plain peasant faces.

Another haven of refuge for the young artist was Domotkanovo in Tver province, the country estate of Vladimir Derviz, an Academy friend who had married one of Serov’s cousins, Nadezhda Simonovich. Serov spent many happy days here, lulled by the unhurried rhythm of rural life, inhaling the musty smells of autumn and admiring its even, grey hues.

The joyful mood which Abramtsevo and Domotkanovo engendered in Serov helped the artist create his most significant early pieces. Almost all of Serov’s works of this period, from the studies of the mid-1880s to the masterpieces, the Two Girls and Overgrown Pond, painted at about the same time in Domotkanovo, are imbued with the same feeling. Serov immerses himself, as it were, in the beauty of the world, his colours are saturated with light and air, soaked by the sun, and radiating joy. He contemplates this beauty with quiet admiration. Each picture is long in the making; he has his models pose for long hours, yet what is revealed on canvas is the very first impression of what he sees.

The model for Girl with Peaches was Mamontov’s twelve-year-old daughter Vera, who sat for the artist in Abramtsevo, for Sunlit Girl, the artist’s cousin Maria Simonovich in Domotkanovo. The two girls turned out to resemble one another, but most of the “blame” for that must go to Serov himself who wanted, above all, to see in them the beauty of youth. He sought in these pictures a gentle, contemplative expressiveness. He did not intend the portraits to provoke thoughts on the contradictions and complexities of life, “only the joys of life”. And it is this that sets Serov apart from his predecessors and his teachers. Repin’s portrait of Modest Moussorgsky, done six years before Girl with Peaches, is also suffused with light, but in this case, it only serves to render with the utmost veracity the aspect and condition of the composer going through a terminal illness. Behind the fleeting moment of human existence captured by the artist there looms a world choked by insoluble problems, a world whose only promise to man is suffering and perdition. With Serov, though, light, air, joy, and youth are beautiful per se; they are the ultimate purpose of the creative act, and it is in this above all else that the novelty of Serov’s approach and the originality of his artistic concept manifest themselves.

The Girls were painted from living persons, yet Serov did not refer to the paintings as portraits or give them the names of the models. This was hardly accidental, because the decisive factor was not the uniqueness of the image, not the individuality of the sitter, but rather Serov’s overall program. In addition, these were not portraits in the customary meaning of the word. Serov’s models are inseparable from their environment. One girl merges into a single entity with the old house and the garden visible through the windows, the other has settled down, as if for good, in the shade of a tree in a sleepy corner of an old, unkempt park. Neither can be imagined in other surroundings, because then we would have different pictures carrying different messages.

Pomors, 1894.

Oil on wood, 33 × 23.3 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Catherine II Setting out to Hunt with Falcons, 1902.

Tempera and gouache on cardboard, 23 × 40 cm.

The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Abraham’s Servant Finds Isaac a Bride, Rebekah, 1894.

Oil on panel, 23.5 × 33 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Portrait of Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich, 1897.

Oil on canvas, 166.7 × 149.5 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

In Girl with Peaches, one actually senses a momentary stillness, a pregnant calm, after which the young creature will erupt into motion and transform the whole interior by mixing up the objects. Movement in the composition is stressed by a receding tabletop and a foreshortened figure. Serov offsets this movement with the pink triangle of the blouse and the free symmetry of the objects scattered around the room, seemingly at random but actually deliberately arranged.

A different motif is chosen for Sunlit Girl. The girl abides in a state of complete rest, with no intention of interrupting it. There is a stillness throughout, a repose, a fusion of the human being with the sun, the air, the environment. Whereas in Girl with Peaches the artist achieves the effect of balanced movement with the help of various compositional devices, here the opposite is true: he seeks to resolve the theme by harmoniously contrasting the motionless figure in the foreground against a backdrop that creates the impression of a spatial “breakthrough”. In both cases Serov transcends the “study”, and though he paints from nature he never loses sight of the finished picture existing in his mind’s eye. This is where he differs from his constant companion Korovin, and in this lies his potential for further change.

There is every indication in both cases of a penchant for Impressionism. Serov did not perceive the environment as a backdrop, as an accompaniment to the main theme. He was interested in every physical object that came into view and in every inch of the painted canvas. With Serov, the surface of each object reflects the light of adjacent objects and absorbs the rays of the sun. Everything is built on subtle transitions – the gradations of the colour values are almost imperceptible, the contours of the figures and objects begin to shift. Moreover, Serov discovers the beauty of colour as such: the tender pink of the girl’s blouse stands in magnificent contrast to the black bow; the deep blue of the skirt in Sunlit Girl does not seem subject to the influence of the sun and retains its integrity. Each pure colour, though, finds its “echo” in other parts of the canvas, sustaining the unity of the work.

Speaking of Serov’s Impressionism, we must bear in mind that it differs essentially from that of the French. To begin with, in the period in question Serov knew very little about the French Impressionists. The French artist he liked most, sharing this preference with many of his colleagues, was the extremely popular Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose manner was a far cry from true Impressionism. Nevertheless, the logic of Russian art’s evolution, its interest in plein air painting and the experience gained in the study of nature all conspired to lead Serov to Impressionist painting.

Summertime. Portrait of Olga Serova, 1895.

Oil on canvas, 73.5 × 93.8 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Sasha Serov, 1897.

Watercolour and white lead on paper, 42 × 58 cm.

Serov Collection, Moscow.

Portrait of Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, 1898.

Oil on canvas, 94 × 111 cm.

The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

The successes achieved by Repin, Polenov, and Surikov in their depictions of nature opened up new vistas before the younger artists. But for Serov’s Girls paintings, as for Korovin in Chorus Girl or Levitan in Birch Grove, it was not enough to emulate their elders. His was a resolute step toward a new system, a step that makes it possible to regard him, together with his contemporaries, as a founder of early Russian Impressionism, a method distinguished for its modesty, restraint, and a certain stylistic disparity. In Serov’s pictures, the painting of the human face was, as yet, substantially different from that of the landscape or interior. In Girl with Peaches, Vera Mamontova’s head is painted in smooth tenuous strokes, where the form and colour coincide completely, whereas in the blouse and the bow they do not. Serov often uses large areas of pure colour, particularly black, which the French Impressionists did their best to avoid. But perhaps the most distinctive feature of Serov’s art, compared to French Impressionism, is his unfeigned interest in the inner life of the model, an interest that continued to be the proud prerogative of Russian art in the 1870s and 1880s despite the new tasks it had to face.