The Petersburg Style in Portraiture & Other Genres
The main genre in Russian painting during Peter’s era is portraiture which is unsurprising as it developed from effigies of people on icons; the parsuna (a word from the Polish for persona) had an effect on “westernized” portrait painting in St Petersburg.[1] We see the ghost of the parsuna genre in portraits by Russian artists like A Antropov (1716-1795), I Argunov (1727-1802), A Matveev (1701-1739) and A P Losenko (1737-1773).[2]This group of painters are responsible for the establishing of the modern portrait in Russia. Their work is assured though not remarkable; it is also derivative of European artistic traditions. Unlike Russian travelling artists (see below) I Vishnyakov (1699-1761) stayed at home but studied under Louis Caravaque, a French painter living in Russia (1618-1754) who painted a portrait of Peter at Astrakhan. Helping to spread European portraiture northwards, Vishnyakov’s most well-known portrait is that of the English girl Sarah Fermor, a visitor to Russia. Though portraiture was easily the most important genre, we should be mindful of others, no matter how rare. Interior decoration was one of these as there is evidence that motifs from allegorical baroque painting had spread from St Petersburg to Moscow by the 1720s. Experiencing a considerable delay, still-life did not really establish itself in Russia until the 19th century, but there were a few produced during Peter’s reign like G. N. Teplov’s Still Life with Parrot (above) painted for the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1737. The port of St Petersburg has a cold, pristine beauty of its own, so we should expect to see it as a source of inspiration for some marine painters. One of these by F Ia Alekseev, View of the Winter Palace Embankment, St Petersburg (1790s) is a good example which shows the influence of the French painter of townscapes- Hubert Robert.
[1] Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution, 191: “The very term parsuna as distinct from portret has come to designate in Russian a kind of effigy, iconic in type, and far more symbolic as such than realistic in representation: an artifact precisely of Old or pre-Petrine Russia.”
[2] Auty and Obolensky, An Introduction to Russian Art and Architecture, 84-85.
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