Читать книгу Russian Painting - Peter Leek - Страница 14

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.

50. Boris Kustodiev, Portrait of Fyodor Chaliapin, 1921. Oil on canvas, 215 × 172 cm, Theatre Museum, St. Petersburg.

51. Alexander Golovin, Portrait of Dmitry Smirnov as Grieux in Jules Massenet’s “Manon”, 1909. Tempera on canvas, 210 × 116 cm, Bakhrushin Theatre Museum, Moscow.

52. Alexander Golovin, Portrait of Fyodor Chaliapin as Boris Godunov, 1912. Tempera and gouache on cardboard, 221.5 × 139.5 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

53. Valentin Serov, Portrait of Savva Mamontov, 1897. Oil on canvas, 187 × 142.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.