The Image of the People in Nineteenth-Century Russian Art
The image of the Russian peasant would have to endure an artistic revolution before it could truly be said to express Russian identity. Part of this struggle was fought on the terrain of genre and landscape painting which fought hard to escape the shackles of the classical tradition imposed on nineteenth-century Russian realist painters. If one wants to get an idea of how the image of the people in Russia drastically changed, then one need only compare Silvester Shchedrin’s Terrace on the Seashore (1827) with Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870) (above). It is immediately obvious even to the casual viewer that the image of the people has undergone a seismic shift resulting in a more socially aware art in which people and landscape are inseparable. Shchedrin’s appealing scene of bearded peasants and picturesque trees brings Russia to Italy with mixed results. Though assured, it is the product of studying the French neo-classical school which was the result of artists living in Rome and Florence. As David Jackson says, in paintings like Shchedrin’s Terrace, “the Steppes are indistinguishable from the Compagna” and “a street in Moscow suggests Rome, or a sunset on the Neva looks like evening on the Venetian Lagoon.”[1] By contrast Repin’s Barge Haulers offers no pretensions to the pretty or decorative; it is a painted social document which shows the exertion and toil of a gang of workers on a territory that was colonised by foreign peoples such as Germans who brought a disciplined work ethic to Russia. Like French artists in the enlightenment and romantic periods, Russian landscape painters were taught to use Italianate and classical models instead of seeking inspiration from their own soil and native traditions. Even Repin, the absolute exemplum of realist, socially aware painting could not escape this as he “was advised to erase studies from life, and instead copy Poussin’s ‘historic’ landscapes in the Hermitage.” Repin “found this copying from the masters an unacceptable practice and was unimpressed by the ‘artificial, darkened, unnatural’ works of the French master.”[2]
[1] David Jackson, “The Motherland: Tradition and Innovation in Russian Landscape in Russian Landscape, eds David Jackson & Patty Wageman, (NG, London, 2003), 52-88, 53.
[2] Ibid.
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