PART IV

Pictures at an Exhibition

7

Academic Vistas

[The arts and epics of the Greeks] still afford us artistic pleasure and... in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model. A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naiveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage?

—Karl Marx, Grundrisse

During the eighteenth-century shift from religious to secular art in Russia, European painting, with its canons, conventions, and hierarchy of genres, took up permanent abode in the Russian Empire. By mid-eighteenth century, a buzzing community of foreign and native artists of every sort catered to the symbolic needs of the state and of moneyed patrons. Eventually an energizing center of this activity arose as the Imperial Academy of Arts—both a training ground for an idealized realm of art, and the principal arbiter of taste.¹ When the gradual turn to naturalism or realism began, it involved and was partly shaped by a challenge to the social imagination and to the ideology of art that was created and sustained behind the thick walls of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

House on the Embankment

Like theater, the art world possessed a headquarters, a showplace, and a training center. The Petersburg Academy of Arts (fig. 48) remains to this day the same impressive piece of architecture on the vaunted Neva Embankment that Pushkin exalted in The Bronze Horseman. The character of an edifice—the distribution of space; the shape of its rooms, walkways and fenestration; and its entire visual system—can have a profound effect on the lives of its denizens and on what they create. The budding art student from the provinces, Ilya Repin, was transfixed upon seeing it for the first time in 1863. The Academy occupies a massive rectangle 140 meters along the river and 125 meters deep, with four square courtyards at the corners and a huge circular yard in the center, along which run three floors of galleries, offices, sketch rooms, classrooms, and attics. The cupolas on the front and rear façades sit atop, respectively, the Conference Hall, the administrative and ceremonial heart; and the interior Orthodox church, recently reopened after many decades. On the front or river side, twin staircases adorned with classical motifs connect elaborate lower and upper vestibules. The Conference Hall, designed in the 1830s by K. A. Thon, has a ceiling by the history painter Vasily Shebuev and is flanked by halls hung with copies of Raphael and Titian, done by Academy artists Karl Bryullov, Fëdor Bruni, and P. V. Basin. In this space, student work was displayed. Galleries of antique art offered ample space for pupils to copy reproductions (fig. 49). The library and administration have moved since then and faculty apartments are no more. But the present administrators—like those in the Academy of Sciences, Pushkin House, and the University—can still look out on the river Neva. In the basement beneath huge stone arches, the carriage drivers had their quarters. In 1834, Lavr Plakhov, in a rare example of a painter exploring the lower regions of the academic environment, portrayed the coachmen relaxing with pipes, conversation, and drinks.²

The Academy, though it had a long prehistory of art school proposals dating back to Peter I, emerged by Senate decree only in 1757 in the reign of Elizabeth. It was the brainchild of Ivan Shuvalov, whose still extant azure blue palace on the corner of Italyanskaya Street and Malaya Sadovaya contained a fine art collection. Empress Catherine II chartered it as an academy in 1764. When Shuvalov went abroad, the pedagogue Ivan Betskoi succeeded him as president and held the post almost to the end of the century. Betskoi, a pallid administrator, presided over a decline due to the budget drain caused by late eighteenth-century wars. The premises were moved in 1769 to several buildings on the Neva. Architects Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe (builder of the Gostiny Dvor) and A. F. Korkorinov launched the construction of a permanent home. As many as five hundred stonemasons and other workers were put to the task which lasted well into the next century, with many halts for financial reasons.³ A British observer in the 1840s described the result as one of “those outwardly splendid piles, with ten times more space that in England would be allowed for the same subject, ten times more out of repair, and ten thousand times dirtier.” The vastness had to accommodate as many as a thousand residents: professors and administrators and their families, students, painters, and servants, priests, and some models as well. The original nucleus of students from the Moscow University gymnasium and Petersburg soldiers’ sons was amplified by children from the foundling homes. Later came a boarding school admitting pupils age five or six for a nine-year course of study. The first class of twenty graduated in 1767. Charter, procedures, and terminology for grades and academic rank were imported from France.⁴

A president, appointed by the monarch, operating more like a university rector than an authoritarian Imperial Theaters chief, was assisted by a vice president, a director (titles varied over time), and a council. One gets an intimate feel for this body from a painting by Adolphe Ladurner around 1840: a ceremonial session in the Conference Hall of about thirty members, middle-aged and elderly uniformed men with sashes, cloaks, and medals sitting solemnly around a long green baize-covered table, with a replica of Michelangelo’s Moses in the alcove above them and spectators behind them (fig. 50). Pay and place in the Table of Ranks ranged from the president (rank IV), through the three rectors, six professors, six adjuncts, the conference secretary, and six councillors. Graduates were given rank XIV: they and all their descendants were forever “free and unencumbered people” with certificates expressly forbidding them to be enserfed. As president, Betskoi was followed by a Frenchman, several high-ranking Russian nobles, and, from 1843 onward, members of the royal family. Until Nicholas I, Academy matters were largely handled with little interference from on high.⁵

Normal squabbles among faculty, administration, and sometimes government marked the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The high-handed Count Marie-Gabriel Choiseul-Gouffier, appointed president by Tsar Paul, took over the apartments of the director, an assistant rector, and a councilor to combine into one big flat for himself. He was later expelled by Paul for reasons unknown. His successor, the learned and well-traveled millionaire and Maecenas of the arts Count A. S. Stroganov (1733-1811), ruled in 1800-1810. A great indirect contribution to the arts was the sponsorship of his serf and probably illegitimate son, the noted architect Andrei Voronikhin, whom he had sent to Europe to study and had freed in 1786. Voronikhin later designed the Kazan Cathedral on the Nevsky. Count Stroganov’s largely friction-free term allowed an influx of serfs and in 1803 secured the exemption of townsmen from tax and draft obligations, a notable boost to lower-class enrollments. Between the death of Stroganov in 1811 and the advent of Olenin in 1817, the Academy had no director and it came under the umbrella of the Ministry of Education.⁶

Alexei Olenin, president 1817-43, a versatile figure, did not achieve distinction in any branch of culture. Yet his enthusiasm as an archaeologist and antiquarian and his lofty connections enabled him to contribute to many fields: as classical theater decorator, head of the Petersburg Imperial Library, and director of the Academy of Arts. Since he was slightly deformed and a participant in literary battles, Olenin became the butt of cruel jokes (Pushkin called him a “cypher on legs”). His conservative stance on some issues guaranteed scorn from Soviet scholars, one of whom credited Olenin for reforms but saw him simplistically as an exemplar of Tsar Alexander I’s period of reaction. Olenin cracked down on discipline inside the Academy and cleaned up the mess he inherited: dirt, foul air and food, a poor clinic, and fiscal corruption. He cut the number of pensioners sent to Rome for study, tightened the grading system, and fired some faculty. Olenin’s most embarrassing moment involved the conference secretary and vice president Alexander Labzin (1776-1825), who was also at the center of a swirl of Russian mysticism and Freemasonry. When Olenin added prominent government and court figures to the roster of honorary members and invited them to special dinners and exhibitions, Labzin sarcastically suggested at a council meeting that if the Academy sought people close to the tsar they should invite his coachman. By not punishing Labzin at once for this remark, Olenin fell into trouble for a time but eventually survived. Since Labzin was pleasant only to inferiors and liked to help students during examinations, he was dismissed ostensibly for this also and exiled to Tobolsk in Siberia. It was said that his pupils accompanied him to the city gates when he left St. Petersburg.⁷

After Tsar Nicholas took the throne, the Academy was placed under the Ministry of the Court. In 1843, the tsar’s son-in-law Duke Maximilian of Leuchtenberg (1817-52), son of Josephine de Beauharnais, took up the presidency, though he was constantly absent on military duty. His widow, Maria Nikolaevna, who succeeded her husband as president (1852-76), usually did not veto decisions of the council. When she tried in 1853 to get an academic appointment for an architect without his taking an examination, she was overruled. Yet her presence as a royal personage clearly affected decisions.

Tsar Nicholas intruded vigorously in the world of art. A fairly good draftsman, he had strong opinions on matters artistic. Contrary to received opinion, as a child Nicholas spent more time drawing than with war toys. Not a day went by without his sketching officers, high-ranking noblemen, houses, and churches. He apparently loved this activity at least as much as martial matters.⁸ As emperor, Nicholas often bypassed the constituted authorities of the Academy as he advised, visited, preached, scolded, promoted and dismissed personnel, and ruled on admissions and curricula. He introduced an academy police detail and more stringent disciplinary punishments. Nicholas was in fact a petty tyrant of the arts, though his tyranny did not seem all that petty to those whose careers and even personal freedom were concerned. Art schools, almost by definition authoritarian, passed down a heritage from the great masters to a new cohort of practitioners. Innovation was discouraged until one had gotten hold of basic principles. Students who had innate talent and who were willing to work and to obey the rules could do very well. Under Nicholas, the Academy itself acquired more power in the art world at large: it now dictated the art curricula of the schools and replaced locals with its own graduates.⁹

Since Olenin’s successors were relatives of the tsar, the real manager of the Academy became Privy Councillor Count Fëdor Petrovich Tolstoy (1782-1873), who served as its vice president, 1828-59. An aristocrat who declined a career as a naval officer to go into art, he was bitterly criticized by his family for dishonoring his social class by “consorting with who knows what kind of German and Russian professors.” The comment reflects the scorn in certain circles of any kind of teaching or creative “work.” Conversely, some artists and teachers looked askance at noble would-be artists. The sculptor Martos saw Tolstoy as someone aspiring “to be simultaneously a count, an officer, and an artist which—in his view—was impossible for a nobleman.” As professor of sculpture and engraving, Tolstoy specialized in reliefs, medals, coins, silhouettes, and patriotic medallions commemorating the events of 1812, mostly executed in a brand of lifeless classicism. But one of his silhouettes, Taking a Recruit, is as bleak as anything ever done on the subject, showing a cart driver turning away from the scene, the recruiter with raised fist, and the serf recruit kneeling and imploring.¹⁰ A family portrait done by Tolstoy in 1830 shows a huge art-filled flat inside the Academy which became a nesting place for many a cultural figure of the age. Tolstoy’s cultivated wife, who spoke many languages, presided over a salon that hosted his young cousin Lev Tolstoy, Pushkin, Alexander Nikitenko, Nestor Kukolnik, and renowned artists. On Sundays, he invited students who, his daughter relates, were grateful for the chance to mingle with great artists at his home. One of them recalled being “on a par” with the upper classes for the first time in his life: “you felt like you were somebody.” An enlightened man of his age, Tolstoy ran a fairly open admissions policy and valued talent above rank.¹¹

The faculty was a mixed lot, originally brought in from abroad, which included at least one Jew, Karl Lebrecht (Leberekht, 1755-1827). Stroganov recruited Russians from all classes except serfs, including the sons of an admiral and an ex-minister, a clockmaker, and a factory manager.¹² The best students went on to become faculty. In 1830, a professor of the first rank earned three thousand rubles per annum and one of the second rank, twenty-five hundred. These were lower than those of university professors but were supplemented by free accommodations and fuel, and with commissions for their work.¹³ In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some of the professors—including Borovikovsky and Levitsky—joined Masonic lodges. A Free Society of Lovers of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts founded in 1801 gathered a secret core of admirers of the exiled radical Alexander Radishchev. Later groups clustered loosely around the Decembrists.¹⁴ But neither this nor any other cultural establishment, such as the Imperial Theater system or the concert societies, ever became a hotbed of radicals as would the universities some day. Throughout the reign of Nicholas I, the Academy of Arts remained remarkably stable—a stability that some would read as moribund rigidity.

Classes in Art

The most vexing issue facing the Academy in the early nineteenth century revolved around social class and admissions, particularly that of serfs. The Academy was not unique in this. In the new universities founded under Alexander I, it took most of two decades of conflicting resolutions and variant interpretations to resolve the issue. In practice, few serfs could apply to university since they required both permission to do so and an academic background for the examinations. University rules eventually allowed the admission of serfs only with prior promise of freedom from their owner which would be granted after completion of the full curriculum and with permission of the Senate. University students, members of the privileged classes, lived in and enjoyed a stipend. The nonserf obligated classes possessed a lower status, though they pursued the same course of study.¹⁵

But the Academy predated the new universities and thus already had serfs for training, though their status was ambiguous. In the eighteenth century, Shuvalov, in the first of many rulings against admitting serfs, argued that “since all the arts are free [he used words derived from both volya and svoboda], then serfs are not to be admitted.”¹⁶ This implied that art was an essentialized property unclaimable by the unfree—even though thousands of serfs were practicing music, theatrical, and decorative arts all over Russia. In practice, the long years and rigid course amidst cold and hunger, combined with social prejudice, did not greatly attract the upper classes in the early decades; and the student body comprised largely serfs, ex-serfs, children of serfs, petty clerks and clerics, soldiers’ sons, peasants of all kinds, and orphans—all males. Under Stroganov, serf enrollment increased but faced contradictory rulings. Serfs were admitted only if their owners agreed to free those awarded a gold medal. Yet they could be pulled out by their masters at any time before the Academy authorities awarded them a medal or teaching certificate which automatically freed them—a frustration to the Academy and a personal tragedy for the unprotected serf artists.¹⁷ As with some serf musicians and actors, the fall from euphoria and an exposure to refinement back down to the servile life led many serf artists to disillusion, drink, and sometimes suicide. Yet the inflow continued: serf owners with pretensions to culture had little need for university graduates; but they did need artists and they pressured the Academy to admit them.

The issue came to a head on October 23, 1817, when the tsar decreed through the Minister of Education that no more serfs were to be admitted to the Academy of Arts. Olenin justified the decree in an epistolary duel with the powerful General Arakcheev who had become virtual viceroy of Russia after 1815. Arakcheev depended upon serf artists and architects for the construction and decoration of elaborate buildings and grounds to satisfy the “dreamy poetic” and utopian side of his autocratic personality. Art and despotism held no contradiction for Arakcheev. An artist in one of his Military Colonies sketched a picture of the general descending into hell. Like other nobles, he supplemented the talent of hired specialists with that of serfs whom he sent to the Academy for training. Ivan Semënov, a serf architect at Gruzino, frequently beaten by his master, was enrolled in the Academy where he eventually won a medal (1859) and became a professor. Prior to 1817, whenever Olenin needed intercession on behalf of his artists, Arakcheev had assisted him.¹⁸

But in a letter of December 16, 1817, Olenin spelled out to Arakcheev why one of his serfs was being returned to him. Said Olenin: exclusion of serfs is good for the Academy, for its remaining students, for the serf owners, and ultimately for the serfs as well. To be an artist without a noble and elevated spirit is impossible, he wrote. Free students who at a tender age have to study and live with immoral people are denied that elevated spirit. Unfortunately, “the foulest vices are characteristic of the bonded or enslaved status, inherited down the generations.” Keeping free students out of such company would preserve the Academy’s reputation. By circumlocution, Olenin tried to tell Arakcheev that the Academy was not a vocational school for training merely skilled craftsmen. Echoing Shuvalov, he wrote: In the Academy, we are producing artists who—due to the very essence of their calling—must absolutely be instilled with ennobling thoughts and sensibilities for the pure enjoyment and exaltation of art; artists whose hearts and minds we must shape, to whom we must speak incessantly of freedom of thought, freedom in the choice of subjects, and of the free arts—for thus they have been called from time immemorial by all enlightened peoples.

A serf at the Academy, argued Olenin, had to work and reside for years with teachers and fellow students who were learning “about freedom, the concept of personal freedom, and its necessary connection to the free arts, and the rights of the artists.” They are pointed to success, rank, and freedom of choice. But if the serf student has to go back to the dead end of unfreedom on the estate, despair and even hatred of the gifts he has acquired emerges, and he turns to drink, an evil fate for the serf himself (and of course—Olenin does not say it—a bane for his owner). Olenin clearly shared the views of his class, articulated in the eighteenth century by Mikhail Shcherbatov among others, that education for the lower orders was harmful to society. Olenin also played to Arakcheev’s loathing of alcohol, to say nothing of his hatred of disobedience or revolt. Olenin’s chief concern was to keep serfs out of contact with free students, though he was willing to allow serf pupils to study informally with Academy professors. His policy, he believed, would spread knowledge to the people, keep down vice, provide good craftsmen for the landowners, secure some monetary gains for the professors, and get the serfs to accept “the humble lot where fate has landed them.”¹⁹

Olenin had a complex view of serfdom. In 1842, he himself possessed 1,845 serfs and his wife owned 420.²⁰ He recognized the need someday to abolish serfdom, but he publicly agreed with those who opposed any sudden or wholesale emancipation.²¹ Historian Frederick Starr is right that Olenin’s 1817 arguments and his enrollment policies were meant to upgrade art from a craft to a profession.²² But the decision to exclude serfs was not his alone: his letter to Arakcheev, dated December 16, 1817, came months after the October decree and one day before an identical decision was taken in the Imperial Theater School—namely that all its incoming pupils had to be free. The ruling from the top was followed ten years later by Nicholas I’s ban on admitting serfs into the universities. Olenin’s views contained contradictions. Like Karamzin and many other nobles, he thought the peasants had been corrupted by serfdom and were thus unfit for freedom,²³ and some passages of the correspondence imply that the corruption was hereditary and unredeemable. Yet Olenin stated openly that he would be happy to accept talented serfs if their owners would free them: he could remold them if they were both free and subject to his discipline. Two ex-serfs became trusted assistants in his ethnographic and antiquarian expeditions: A. I. Ermolaev and F. G. Solntsev.

In 1817 Olenin asked all landowners who had serfs at the Academy to free them, and a few did so. The serfs of those who refused he expelled with the aid of police. Even those who had finished course work and were waiting for stipend announcements were returned to their masters, some to become house painters, cooks, and lackeys. Before long, under various guises, serfs began infiltrating the Academy again. Though it was strictly illegal, professors would take on serf pupils, give them access to the Academy services, and even get them into the Hermitage to copy the masters. Upon Olenin’s death in 1843, the ban was reiterated.²⁴

Olenin reduced the student body from about 300 to 160, lowered the number of nonserf lower-class admissions, and cut down the curriculum from twelve to nine and a half years. Courses in dance and music were made mandatory as a runway to gentility. Data on social origins from a limited but representative sample of graduates show that in the eighteenth century, a bit under 25 percent of Academy students were sons of officers, officials, or nobles (though the categories overlap); about 31 percent were sons of artists, musicians, merchants, and artisans; and about 43 percent were sons of serfs, state peasants, servants, clerks, priests, and (more than half of this category) soldiers and sailors. In the same period, the most successful artists in terms of reputation and commissions came from the lower two categories. Orphans abounded in these groupings, as they did in the early years of the Theater School. In the period 1800-1830 the top category jumped drastically, especially in the case of officials, from about 25 to about 44 percent. The middle group increased only slightly to over 33 percent; within it, the number of artisan children fell sharply and that of artists’ children rose. The percentage of lower-class graduates fell sharply (from about 43 to about 22 percent) as admission requirements were tilted against them, although the number of serf children rose from fourteen to thirty-one. No soldiers’ sons graduated. The pattern continued roughly from 1833 to 1839 (there is a gap in the data for 1839-50). For the years 1850-55, compared to the period 1800-1830, the top category fell by about 2 percentage points; the middle group fell from about 33 to near 26 percent; and the lowest group rose from about 21 to about 31 percent. In the lowest ranges, the townsmen swamped all the rest and the children of serfs were down from about 12 to about 5 percent.²⁵

The Academy’s student body resembled that of the Theater School only in the presence of art and stage "dynasties"—more for actors than artists—and in the release of obligated classes from government taxes, military service, and other burdens. The number of art students from the lower orders took a severe dip in the first three decades of the century but was on the rise in the early 1850s. Unlike the Theater School, the Academy always enrolled gentry. Their number grew significantly in the early nineteenth century, though middle- and lower-ranking officials outnumbered them. Like the universities, the Academy admitted only males. There were art courses for women in St. Petersburg in the 1840s and 1850s but I have found no details. One woman, Marfa Dovgaleva, managed to get a silver medal from the Academy. Sofiya Sukhovo-Kobylina (1825-67), sister of a well-known playwright and of the writer Evgenia Tur, received a silver medal in 1849 and a gold one in 1853 and 1854 for landscape, the first woman to do so. The Theater School grew increasingly Russian; the Academy was always mostly so. At least one Polish Jew, Samuel Mikhelson, a townsman from Kiev, was admitted to art classes.²⁶

The Academy made a distinction, modeled on university statutes, between regular students and auditors. The former came up through the boarding school for pupils from ages five or six in a nine-year course of general education and art. Pupils wore a uniform of blue jacket, short pants, white stockings, and shoes with lyre-shaped buckles. The best of these were admitted to the Academy proper for a six-year course in painting, sculpture, architecture, or applied arts. The rest enrolled in what the French academy called moindres metiers—metal and woodwork and other manual arts. The school began with a triennial intake of about sixty. The admission age for the boarding school was regularly raised, and the length of study reduced; by 1830 the age was fourteen for a six-year curriculum. Regular students lived in, received scholarships, and followed a broad curriculum at the end of which they received a certificate, a government rank of XII (of the fourteen in the Table of Ranks), and became eligible for a pensionate to the Academy’s branch in Rome. In 1798, the Academy opened a drawing school for auditors who lived outside the Academy and paid for their course work; they studied side by side with students but in a narrower curriculum. High-quality work could move an auditor into student status.²⁷

The student round began at fiveA.M. with prayer and a Spartan breakfast of bread and Neva water, followed by classroom study, a hearty lunch of soup and meat, more prayer, rest, and classes. Misbehavior was endemic. One external student explained his constant tardiness by the melting ice on the Neva River that he had to cross. Olenin curtailed visits and socializing and ordered jail and expulsion for misconduct and for student protests about the food. In winter, an ice rink and slides were erected in the courtyards. Music and theater added light moments. Stag dancing was permitted, and amateur drama groups, using female relatives of the students, performed comedies and vaudevilles for the staff.²⁸ The gentry adapted with ease to the magnificent surroundings. Boarding students whose parents resided far away had to endure homesickness. Those from the lower classes faced the social tensions of studying with more privileged boys and probably felt the gulf between their station in life and the elevated ideals of the curriculum. To alleviate the situation, a later official, Fëdor Lvov, ran a salon at the Academy for student commoners, to replace the habits of the “country tavern” with good manners and social intercourse. As a whole, student life was more bearable than that in military academies or seminaries.²⁹

The mixture of everyday bleakness and the light of opportunity may be illustrated by the experiences of a few lower-class art students. Lavrenty Seryakov (1824-81), son of a serf, suffered a rough childhood as a cantonist in the Military Colonies where he witnessed the brutal crushing of a revolt. A stroke of fortune got him sent to St. Petersburg for clerical work and he ended up in a topography office. Odoevsky and Kukolnik discovered his talent for wood engraving (as did Bulgarin) and he gradually moved into intelligentsia circles. When Seryakov requested permission to attend the Academy of Arts, his chief responded: “How dare you even consider it?” Kukolnik petitioned the minister of war who in turn got a favorable response from the tsar. In 1847, at the age of twenty-three, Seryakov was admitted. Through the veil of success, Seryakov later recalled the humiliating treatment serf pupils endured in the 1840s. One false move on their part, he claimed, and they could be sent home to serfdom or, worse, sent off to be soldiers. Seryakov himself won the status of Free Artist and from 1858 spent six years in France and Italy where he won some acclaim. He returned to Russia and was named an Academician.³⁰

Fëdor Solntsev (1801-92), son of a serf from Yaroslav Province, had a knack for drawing from nature and copying popular prints. The low level of teaching in his village led him to aspire to the Academy of Arts. Luckily his father, granted freedom to travel and work by the master, served as cashier at the Imperial Theaters, and he used his connections to get his son into the Academy. Solntsev recalled being whipped for misbehavior, but said that gentry boys committed the wildest pranks. When Olenin became president, he noticed Solntsev’s talent and hired him as an assistant in archeological work. Solntsev went on to become a scholar of antiquities and restorer of art and sculpture in Novgorod, Kiev, and the Moscow Kremlin. In his later years he was grandly feted by state and society as an archaeological pioneer.³¹

Taras Shevchenko, whose travails as a serf artist are related in chapter 8, got his freedom in 1838 and studied at the Academy until 1843 with fellow students who were mostly townsmen, merchants, peasants, and even serfs. The future poet recalled close teacher-pupil relations, especially with Karl Bryullov who had helped him gain his freedom and with whom he frequently dined. Shevchenko earned some money from portraits, though sometimes the client reneged on payment or offered food in stead of a fee. But the headiness of his newly won freedom led Shevchenko to carouse sometimes in various haunts on Vasilevsky Island. The Berlin Tavern and the restaurant of Carolina Jürgens were meeting places for students, poor clerks, and slovenly artists wearing long hair, beards, and wide-awake hats with ample brims who crowded in to see the celebrated Bryullov. For Shevchenko, basking in freedom, these were “unforgettable golden days.” Having tasted the magic of life in the Academy, Shevchenko traveled back to his birthplace in Ukraine where the misery, injustice, and cruel treatment of serfs led him into radicalism.³²

Gentry students suffered none of the corporal punishment or social discrimination of their humbly born classmates. The Guards officer F. F. Lvov, brother of the composer and later an Academy official, recalled that many of his fellow officers studied at the Academy in the 1830s. Their commander, Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, brother of Tsar Nicholas, once told them that “Russia needs officers, not scholars and artists”; yet he encouraged drawing classes in the army. Lvov summoned up in his memoirs how the students crowded outside the classrooms in order to get good seats and how their ardor for the arts warmed them up in the drafty hallways. When not in class, they hurried off to the opera—a ferry or sleigh ride across the Neva—and on returning had to bite their tongues to stop singing arias from the then popular Robert le diable and Fenella.³³

Painters followed a fixed progression: copying sketches, busts, and live models first, and then studying grouping and composition. The models, mostly peasants, received in the Olenin years a remarkable three hundred rubles a year plus clothing and meals for both modeling and clean-up duties. The Academy, like its French prototype, stressed draftsmanship, linear perspective, modeling, stereotyped figures, scrupulous imitation of small details, archaeological accessories, narrative, textual sources, and especially fini, the “finish”—with line dominant over color, no traces of brush strokes, no ragged edges.³⁴ The well-known master Alexei Venetsianov captured the atmosphere in the life drawing class at the Academy (fig. 51). Disobeying his instructions to offer a perspective study of the large semicircular auditorium where students were working with a nude model, and anticipating his eventual drift from academic procedures, Venetsianov offered instead cartoon surveys of a score of students, models, and professors talking, drawing, looking around, and loafing in a very informal milieu.³⁵ Venetsianov conveyed a real sense of place as the written sources rarely do: the large space as workplace, social gathering, and site of order, disorder, and hierarchy.

Graduates of the Academy could take a number of different routes, depending on their performance. All received a certificate of good behavior and competence from the conference secretary and the council. Major and minor gold and silver medals attested to the relative grading on the final examination. Students were assigned themes on which a sketch had to be made within twenty-four hours, followed by a canvas to be executed in one or two years without diverging from the sketch. The major gold medalist became an “Artist” (and after 1840 “Class Artist I”), with the government rank of XIV and the right to study for six years in Europe. Upon return, usually from Rome, those considered worthy could join the faculty of the Academy. The silver medallist, “Class Artist II,” got no rank until he found employment. Those who passed without a medal became Non-Class Artists or “free artists,” who, like all those above, were exempt from the military or compulsory state service and payment of the poll tax. They and their children were henceforth exempt from enserfment. All who received exemptions from obligations required a “class discharge” (uvolnitelnoe svidetelstvo) or release document from their home province governors and approval of the Senate. Graduates of all ranks were given preference over nongraduates in government commissions and public works. The Academy of Arts produced an estimated two thousand artists in all fields from its birth until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.³⁶

The Academy drew on the lower classes, as did the state, the army, and the landowners. Nicholas, though always ambivalent about educating commoners, in fact wanted an army of painters and ballerinas. Writing in the late Stalinist period, the Soviet art historian A. V. Savinov claimed that the Academy of Arts was the most democratic institution of higher education in Russia. By that he did not, of course, mean self-rule but rather the proportion of lower-class students and the relative lack of special patronage and favoritism.³⁷ There are two ways of looking at the social mobility which Savinov stresses. From the viewpoint of the rulers who owned the school, the Academy was a conduit from one kind of service (and servility) into another; from soldiering or serf labor into the ranks of artists, most of whom would teach or do pictures for the state or for gentry patrons. Their status varied from low-paid art instructors in the schools to professors and highly paid portraitists. Those in the higher range certainly possessed more social prestige, if not more fame, than actors. For example, Moscow merchant clubs in the 1850s included artists with Academy diplomas as regular guests along with professors and physicians—an honor that few actors enjoyed, Mikhail Shchepkin being an exception.³⁸ From the viewpoint of the talented poor lad who managed to win success, the training and the degree or medal were a ticket to a new life. The polarity and intermittent clash of these two perspectives shaped the social history of the Academy until the emancipation.

Of Gods and Heroes

What kind of art did students and professors produce for Russia? A fixed feature of the early Russian intelligentsia was their exposure to foreign ideas through reading imported materials and extended visits to Europe, especially the German university towns. Upon their descent from the exalted climes of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel and their return to Russia, the men of this generation virtually invented the main currents of Russian intellectual history. The esthetic parallel emanating from Russians in Rome has captured much less attention. Rome, because of its classical and Renaissance traditions, its landscape and light, had long before 1800 become a Mecca for European artists and creative people. The artistic road to Rome opened in seventeenth-century France and its status as cultural center achieved mythic proportions from the writings of Europeans who visited or lived there, such as Winckelmann, Goethe, and Byron, to name only a few. The aura of the Eternal City was enhanced by Mme. de Staël's popular Corinne, based on an 1807 tour. The novel is soaked in an atmosphere of art, architecture, ancient streets, historical figures, and active painters and sculptors such as Antonio Canova. The Russian Academy of Arts chose Italy as its principal source of artistic standards and it maintained regular contact with Rome from the late eighteenth century onward. Generations of creative Russian figures—painters and sculptors in particular—were shaped in the cultural crucible on the Tiber River.³⁹

Aside from the few artists rich enough to finance their sojourns, the three roads to Rome for Russian students began with private patrons or owners; the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, a sponsoring organization; and, for most, an Academy pensionate. Awardees were assigned to a prominent local advisor, such as Vincenzo Camuccini or the Dane Berthel Thorwaldsen. Fëdor Matveev (1758-1826), the first Russian artist to take up regular residence in Italy, died there. F. Ya. Alexeev (1753-1824) gained fame by applying the techniques of the much-admired Canaletto’s Venetian waterscapes to the Neva. A golden age opened with Orest Kiprensky (1783-1836) who lived in Rome from 1816 to 1822. Silvestr Shchedrin, arriving in 1818, become intoxicated with Italy. Then came Fëdor Bruni, Bryullov, and—eventually the most famous of all—Alexander Ivanov. In the salons of expatriates such as Zinaida Volkonskaya artists mixed with other creative figures. Almost all the painters executed landscapes and cityscapes in and around Rome and sometimes Venice and Naples. Although the usual pensionate was three years, starting in the 1820s some Russian artists remained a decade or more, steeping themselves in antiquity and the Renaissance. For them, Italy was a museum of the fine arts, the mammoth original of the reproductions they had studied in back on the Neva.⁴⁰

One of the earliest Russian photographers, Sergei Levitsky, in 1845 took a group picture of the Russian art colony in Rome, Nikolai Gogol among them, wearing wide-awake hats, voluminous cloaks, walking sticks, and other paraphernalia of the era’s romantic poses. The photo clearly suggests an atmosphere of bohemianism and emigré abandon that Russian artists at home did not possess. The writer Elizaveta Kologrivova applied the popular romantic theme of the eternal struggle between love and art to the life of a Russian artist in Rome in a short story, “Lady of the House” (1843), which pits personal romance against the worship of pure beauty. Real life was not quite so ethereal. Bryullov was having marital troubles and imbibing heavily. His friends led scandalous lives. The painter Orest Kiprensky drank too much, and the sculptor Nikolai Ramazanov caused such an uproar that he was ordered back to Russia under guard.⁴¹ Tsar Nicholas, hearing bad reports about pensioners abroad, declared that if the miscreants had already shown signs of moral deformity at the Academy, then the council members who had endorsed them should repay the wasted money, including their return fares. In the 1840s, he established a committee to oversee the Rome pensioners, went there himself, and assumed the role of an inspector general, praising, rebuking, and commanding artists: “You [ty], Vorobev, your work could not be better”; “you Ramazanov, make your nymphs more modest.”⁴² The Italian romance peaked in the 1830s and 1840s and, as the Roman phalanx returned to assume academic posts on the Neva, had the result of reinforcing the classical-historical style of painting at the Academy.

The hierarchy of genres and a supporting ideology dated back to the Renaissance when historia stood as the highest category. By the mid-seventeenth century, the French Academy was ranking pictorial narrative above other genres. Mythic and real people of power, linked together by an idea, a story, a lesson, or a drama outranked the prosaic small beer of still life, trompe l’oeil, and landscape. Academic pedagogy ruled that perfection had been reached in Greece and Rome and that the Italian Renaissance had kept alive the eternal laws of the beautiful. The style historique gained further authority in eighteenth-century Germany from Winckelmann, Lessing, and Schiller, among others. That style in Britain revived when the Royal Academy was founded in 1769 precisely to train a school of history painting as the art form that conveyed public virtues displayed in classical postures of the great heroes and gods of antiquity. The terms “noble” and “heroic” were employed to stress the lofty character of this art. Art lovers revered those classical worlds—shrouded in myths and embellished by ancient drama—of Trojans, Athenians, Spartans, and Romans, locked in war, adventure, and tragedies of hopeless love and helpless struggle against nature and the gods.⁴³ Taras Shevchenko, in The Artist, quoted his friend and mentor Bryullov on Greek and Roman history: “Everything in it is simplicity and refinement.”⁴⁴

Three Russian historical painters achieved notoriety in their time. Fëdor (Fidelio) Bruni (1801-75), born in Milan the son of a Swiss artist, traveled to Russia with his family and entered the Academy of Arts. Sent to Rome in 1818, Bruni eventually garnered recognition from several Italian academies. Zinaida Volkonskaya had him do a portrait of her posing as Tancred, the doomed hero-king of Boccaccio, Tasso, Voltaire, and Rossini. Bruni’s fame derived from classical renditions, the best known of which is the vivid Death of Camilla, Horatio’s Sister (1824). Though Livy is the original source, Bruni may have been inspired by Corneille’s Horace performed on the Petersburg stage in 1817, or by Fernando Paer’s 1799 opera on the theme which was also well known in Russia. Horatio, one of the famous three brothers, has returned from war to find his sister lamenting the death of her betrothed whom he has just slain. Horatio responds to her grief by putting her to death. This canvas is a veritable textbook of classical composition with its coulisse frame, bas-relief treatment, perspective, positioning of groups, and use of the diagonal for narrative effect. The stoical Horatio occupies the center, his head is lighted, and the lines converge on him. Little sympathy is evoked for the hapless Camilla who lies in anguish at his feet.⁴⁵

Alexander Ivanov (1806-58) executed classical studies before he began his more famous works. Priam Begs Achilles for Hector’s Body (1824) is a startling psychological reconstruction of Achilles’ ambiguous sexual orientation. Ivanov, himself a homosexual, embedded into a standard historical frame the kind of subtleties, complexities, and contradictions that abound in private spheres; and the painting’s level of intimacy suggests realistic genre rather than history or myth. Achilles, modeled by a strikingly beautiful Italian boy, is presented sitting in victorious judgment as Priam in deep supplication requests that he may bury the body of his slain son, Hector. With lips curled in merciless contempt, Achilles beholds the father of the killer of his beloved Patrocles. One of his fists is clenched in rage, the other furled in an effeminate pose. The mixture of fury and desolation over a lost love is unmistakable. No greater contrast can be found than in the picture by A. I. Notbek on the same subject done in the same year, with its stiff posing of Achilles in a painfully uninteresting composition.⁴⁶

The most renowned Russian painter of the age in his own time, Karl Bryullov (originally Brudeleau, 1799-1852), was descended from Huguenots who fled France and ended in St. Petersburg. His father taught at the Academy; and the student Karl’s talent won him a stipend for Rome. During his first sojourn in 1823 -24, Bryullov, Prince G. G. Gagarin, the architect Konstantin Thon, and one of the Dolgoruky boys performed Fonvizen’s The Minor at home to entertain the Russian colony and to keep up their Russian. Later Bryullov fell into loose living, but his creative powers remained unhindered. He steeped himself in history, literature, and classical learning, devouring Scott, Schiller, Shakespeare, and the historian Leopold von Ranke. Moving with ease among an international aristocracy, this nonnoble painter illustrated how talent could sometimes transcend rank.⁴⁷

Bryullov's masterpiece, The Last Day of Pompeii (1830-33), fused classical dignity in death with romantic terror (fig. 52). The painter chose a well-documented event in Roman history: the eruption of Vesuvius. Gagarin attests that Bryullov was inspired both by a visit to the excavations and by his friend Giovanni Pacini’s 1825 opera, L'ultimo giorno di Pompeii. The Pacini opera, dedicated to his (and probably Bryullov’s) sometime lover Yuliya Samoilova (nee Countess Julie de Pahlen or Julia von der Pahlen), melodramatically recreated a fatal historical day. The libretto weaves an elaborate plot about ancient Romans that concludes with a fiery finale, the voices simultaneously and repetitively thundering the words “the last day of Pompeii is written in the heavens” and “we are fleeing, we are fleeing.” Although Bryullov drew from Pliny, his canvas invokes no single narrative, and viewers are clearly expected to construct their own for the imminent victims of the mountainous explosion. Both the opera and Bryullov’s picture are examples of disaster art, taking their place alongside the era’s romantic treatments of floods, massacres, shipwrecks, fires, giant battles, and mental agonies.⁴⁸

Pompeii, going well beyond its Russian classical forebears, employs acting poses of the classical stage but also naturalistic gestures. However static it may appear to modern viewers, this canvas—the Medusa raft and the Chios massacre hurled back two millennia—took the Russian and European public by storm. Pompeii's original commissioner is unknown, but it was sold to the Urals millionaire industrialist, Anatoly Demidov (1812-70), who presented it to Tsar Nicholas. Herzen subjectively read the canvas as suggesting the impending doom of the corrupt tsarist system in the aftermath of the Decembrist Revolt.⁴⁹ Viewers in the capital however responded with enthusiasm, not fear. Pompeii prompted a flood of history paintings as well as some popular cultural responses. In 1840, Nikolai Nekrasov in Pantheon anonymously satirized an imaginary provincial who thought the painting depicted a fire in Tula. Entrepreneur Christian Leman mounted a tableau on the theme at his Petersburg circus.⁵⁰ The painting now hangs proudly in the Russian Museum, still exerting its eerie spell on Russian viewers and foreign visitors, even those who prefer to hurry on to see the once-hidden works of the Russian avant-garde.

Bryullov's triumphant return from Rome in 183 5 had a dual character. The success of Pompeii bolstered conservatism at the Academy where he taught until 1849, yet the painting’s author tried to shift away from antique body studies which, he said, obscured the beauties of the living body and became a “lifeless” exercise. In 1836 he painted the twenty-seven-year-old Kukolnik at the peak of his theatrical fame. Savinov, perhaps driven by his prior opinion of the subject, stated baldly that Bryullov captured the “superficiality of [Kukolnik's] nature.”⁵¹ Superficiality there may have been, but surely this affectionate work shows no sign of it. Justly celebrated are Bryullov’s several portraits of Yuliya Samoilova, one of which, with her foster daughter, stresses the “quasi-maternal civilizing role” of this eminent socialite.⁵² Bryullov, as a European celebrity, raised the status of painters in Russian society. As a charismatic personality, he lived high, entertained lavishly, and assisted in the manumission of at least three serf artists. An admiring poet saw fit to record her single meeting with him in a verse full of tender admiration. The censor Nikitenko, who dined with him in 1840, was asked by a high official: “is he really a drunkard? They’re all that way, these actors and artists.”⁵³ Some contemporaries charged Bryullov, like his drinking friends Glinka and Kukolnik, with a moral decay that ruined him as an artist.⁵⁴ Bryullov suffered neglect for a long time after his death in 1852, but an 1899 jubilee marked a minor revival of his reputation. The composer Alexander Ippolitov-Ivanov wrote a cantata in his honor and a pious cult began to take shape.⁵⁵

Biblical and mythological themes fell under the rubric of history painting and proliferated during the reign of Catherine II. Huge allegorical canvases of deities, nymphs, and satyrs flourished as part of the European rage for such subjects and because they could be folded into the panegyric utopia and “paradise myth” surrounding eighteenth-century monarchs. Savinov claims that after the great popular uprising of Pugachev in the 1770s, mythology in art rose in significance, presumably to deflect attention from reality. He cites no evidence of intention. But deflection was certainly functioning via the classical pastorale or Arcadia, a dreamlike landscape inhabited by carefree humans and semihumans whose main business was pleasure—erotic, musical, or simply leisurely. Its key figure, the shepherd, was the most unlaboring laborer in all of art. As in theater, the systematic banishment of real toil in a rural setting, a major feature of eighteenth-century landscape painting, came to represent for critics the underlying falsity of that art.⁵⁶

The biblical subtheme of the historical genre appealed to painters for its rich and pious narratives. But by the nineteenth century, the genre had declined in quality. A. E. Egorov (1776?-1851), the son of a Kalmyk prisoner of war, after passing through a foundling home, became a boy genius at the Academy and then attained great success as a professor of history painting. His most famous work, the monumental Torment of the Savior (1814) won wide acclaim. In 1840, Egorov incurred the enmity of Tsar Nicholas I in his painting of church images and was dismissed after nearly a lifetime at the Academy. Bruni’s late contribution is the grandiose Brass Serpent, which he worked on in Rome and St. Petersburg between 1826 and 1841. By the time of its completion almost a decade after Bryullov’s Pompeii, this anachronistic biblical canvas, though full of romantic horror, could no longer shock.⁵⁷ How utterly different the fate of the masterpiece created by Alexander Ivanov, a seer and a seeker who spent the critical years of his creative life in Rome, 1831-58, and worked there on Christ Appearing to the People for more than a decade. This awkward large-scale narrative canvas is more interesting as a psycho-religious document than as art. Ivanov’s Delphic utterances about its significance, the lengthy and intricate process of its composition, and the constant stream of talk about it prepared Petersburg audiences for an exceptionally exciting first viewing in 1858. Shown at the Hermitage and then at the Academy (fig. 53), Christ Appearing enjoyed only mixed success. Its numerous cryptic figures puzzled many; and its “realism” applied to a sacred subject offended some at the Academy. Virtually all shades of intelligentsia opinion, however, applauded Ivanov as the prophet of a truly Russian art: Herzen, Stasov, the Slavophiles, Gogol, the emerging radical journalists, and later the Itinerants.⁵⁸

As Werner Busch has succinctly put it, classical heroic pictures argued rather than adorned. In the course of time, the universal moral hero drawn from antiquity was joined by “national” heroes endowed with specific local virtues and characteristics. Thus the abstract moral made room for the national political.⁵⁹ For a long time, Russian history could not compete with antiquity as a source of painters’ creativity. Foreign locales or bygone epochs outnumbered Russian settings well into the 1870s. A typical Russian product of historical classicism, the history painter Anton Losenko (Losenkov, 1737-73), came from a merchant family and was brought to St. Petersburg as a choirboy in the Capella. When his voice broke, he attended the Academy, received a pension to Paris and Rome, and at home rose on the faculty ladder. Losenko, though unoriginal, was the first Russian to execute a large-scale treatment in oil of a Russian historical event, St. Vladimir and Rogneda (1770). The story in the painting, drawn from the Russian Primary Chronicle, has Prince Vladimir of Kiev courting Rogneda after he has just killed her father and ravaged her lands. Losenko fell from grace due to intrigues and died in poverty, but the Russian historical painting lived on.⁶⁰

At the turn of the century, the Russian theme in historical painting received a boost from Nikolai Karamzin, whose popular twelve-volume history of Russia (1816-29) later fed the Russian national revival. In an 1802 essay on suitable historical subjects for artists, he wrote: “Not only can a historian and a poet be agents of patriotism, but a painter and sculptor as well. If a historical character is presented strikingly on canvas or in marble, it makes even the [Russian] chronicles more interesting for us: we are curious to find out from which source the artist got his inspiration, and with great attention we read the description of the man’s deeds, recalling what a lively impression his [deeds] made on us.”⁶¹ In 1804, Tsar Alexander I echoed Karamzin, ordered more paintings on Russian history, and named several themes. Vasily Popugaev, a commoner and a preacher of enlightenment, unlike Karamzin, condemned serfdom. In 1803 he demanded the depiction of popular-national heroes such as the lowly butcher of Nizhny Novgorod who is credited with saving Russia from turmoil during the Time of Troubles. Alexander Turgenev in 1804 suggested that the real heroes deserving artistic treatment were fighters against tyranny.⁶²

Orest Kiprensky’s Dmitry Donskoi (1803), executed amidst this discussion, exceeded in merit and interest most of its predecessors and successors. Dmitry Ivanov’s prize-winning Marfa of Novgorod (1808) featured a political leader in Novgorod in the late fifteenth century who opposed Moscow’s efforts to subdue her city. Savinov is surely right in saying that this canvas would have been unthinkable under Nicholas I because of its subversive message. In 1814, A. I. Ivanov (father of the famous Ivanov) produced The Heroic Act of a Young Kievan. The “young Kievan” is a classical nude on a tenth-century battlefield, with his Pecheneg adversaries draped in Roman garb. Neither this nor similar efforts did much to advance the genre of Russian historical pictures.⁶³ The French invasion produced a frenzy of national works in all the arts. From 1812 onward patriotic subjects were part of the Academy of Arts’s examination process, with such assigned themes as a priest defying the enemy, the kindness of Russian troops to prisoners, and the valor of those Russians executed in Moscow by the French. The harrowing 1813 picture, The Shooting of Russian Patriots by the French in Moscow in 1812, has been attributed to Vasily Shebuev. As in the plays and odes of the early 1800s, distant struggles against Tatars and Poles were enlisted to illustrate the present menace.⁶⁴ Painters failed to range widely in Russian historical subject matter after the Napoleonic wars. N. Ivanchin-Pisarev, a pious monarchist, in the early 1830s listed many historical subjects and lamented the inactivity of painters who still busied themselves with Greek and Roman subjects. He ended by suggesting a depiction of the crushing of the Decembrist uprising on Senate Square with Tsar Nicholas as the hero. The Russianized German Karl Kohlmann, later a member of the Academy, had already produced in the late 1820s a canvas treating this event.⁶⁵ History painting has long been out of fashion almost everywhere, though it can still excite the young who are seeing a large oil canvas for the first time. But even in its own time, the Russian product did not distinguish itself by great artistry or antiquarian accuracy. The works of eighteenth-century Russian painters especially reflect a poverty of research and a glut of abstract heroes and classicist idealization. Shebuev and Egorov, sheltered in the Academy from childhood, were enveloped by its system. The faces on their canvases lack a special character, the bodies and gestures are sculptural rather than painterly. Bruni, though a great craftsman, stiffened his figures into a tableau rather than forging a drama. Even works dealing with contemporary events seem false: the protagonists are often given gestures and poses from ancient Rome. Capturing a moment in historical narrative is normally done by means of a “dramatic closeup.”⁶⁶ The Russian historicists rarely mastered the narrative conventions of battle, meeting, or confrontation; and they lacked knowledge of formula and stock detail that make historical canvases interesting and significant. This resulted partly from the constraints of the academic mode, but also from a still very weak grasp of Russian history and archaeology.

The Art of Elevation

In a remarkable kind of self-denying ordinance, the European and Russian arbiters of academic art, though closely linked to the aristocracy, forbade the two supremely class-serving genres of painting—portrait and manorial landscape—to take precedence over the more abstract genre of history. As late as 1829, the British Royal Academy counted it a special exception to admit John Constable, “a mere landscape painter,” to its ranks. At the Russian Imperial Academy, portraiture was long held in low esteem, and it was a kind of insult to say “he is a portraitist.”⁶⁷ But this branch of painting, along with landscape, had great appeal to the ruling classes; however idealized as art, those genres dealt with the world of the creator and his subject or patron.

European portraiture’s conventions gave males strong character and females tenderness and delicacy. The privileged male subject must show dignity, stasis, and reserve—mirroring the restraint expected in polite society. The background, bathed in cool light, must reinforce that image with balance, opulence, and antiquity as signs of refinement and historical stability—even timelessness. The social order was incarnated in the poser and his setting. The full face, considered most effective for males, should be devoid of surprise, disgust, sadness, anger, or fear. Sometimes the tranquil enjoyment of riches, power, and pleasure got conveyed by “stylized informality” as in a cross-legged pose, but it was never cheapened by a smug smile. The portraitist, like a theater director, combined narrative, position, costume, props, and scenic background. The painter usually did the head at a live sitting and then added a background, with a well-established visual vocabulary of drapes, furniture, classical motifs, and a window to the outside world. Different rules applied for females, children, and family ensembles. Distance between figures, lighting, the body-face positioning, and the gaze were all arranged in a hierarchy of age, gender, and sometimes class.⁶⁸

Family continuity occupied a high place alongside vanity in filling one’s homes with portraits, old and new. A string of generational pictures on the walls of a domestic gallery or along a staircase formed excellent propaganda for genealogy and status. I. G. Galagin, a Chernigov landowner, had his serf execute imagined portraits of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, Ivan Mazeppa, and other Ukrainian hetmans of earlier times. The high-ranking official Viktor Kochubei (1768-1834) had his gallery of illustrious Cossack ancestors captured in a painting by G. K. Mikhailov. Landowner F. I. Glebov positioned images of the chronicles of Nestor and Pimen in his portrait gallery at home to suggest an ancient lineage.⁶⁹ Ancestral portraits formed one element in a visual system that included armorial bearings, obelisks, gravestones, and other markers of a “genealogical nest,” though the nest might have been far newer than the family line. Seventeenth-century Russian pictures of tsars, metropolitans, and boyars had combined a secular subject matter with icon-like format. As European portrait styles made their entrance in the early eighteenth century, the “parade” or ceremonial portrait flourished with its key features of serenity and grandeur.⁷⁰ Portraits of adult males and of female rulers resembled the “swagger portraits” that Thomas Lawrence made for British aristocrats—images of vaulting self-confidence framed in antiquity, their subjects festooned with medals and sashes.⁷¹ Stalin-era critics liked to mock the eighteenth-century portrait for its “military parade rigidity.”⁷² In fact, some of them were wrought with great sensitivity. Miniatures, half-portraits normally with a monochrome background and no props, were effective devices of family art. Rulers and great families delighted in seeing their images on tiny artifacts.

The great impresario of the Silver Age, Sergei Diaghilev, singled out among the giants of the Academy Levitsky and Borovikovsky as Russia’s greatest painters. Dmitry Levitsky (173 5-1822), was descended from a provincial priest in Ukraine and had an artist father as his first teacher. A visiting artist took him under his wing and in 1758 Levitsky enrolled in the Academy where he ended up heading the portrait faculty. Levitsky, though patronized by the very rich, retired poor and old with a miserly pension. To support his grandchildren, the seventy-two-year-old had to return to work at the Academy in 1807. Levitsky’s well-known Catherine as Lawmaker (1783), set in the temple of Themis, the Greek Titan and goddess of law and justice, has no pretensions of subtlety in its symbolism. In a study of P. A. Demidov (1780s), a fabulously wealthy member of the famed merchant family, the subject, casual in a cross-legged pose, displays both the tools (watering can) and the creations (potted plants) of his horticultural hobby. Scholars have suggested that the plants served also as a metaphor for education and upbringing, of which Demidov was a promoter. Levitsky put his sitters at ease both as Russians and as Europeans. Undeniably delightful are his rendering of high-born women in action: separate studies of Alexandra Lëvshina and Ekaterina Nelidova (1773) dancing the minuet; and a Smolny pupil playing the servant girl in Giovanni Pergolesi’s opera, La serva padrona (1733). In art historian George Heard Hamilton’s only slightly exaggerated words, he “invented the character of St. Petersburg society for some time to come.”⁷³

Vladimir Borovikovsky (1757-1825), an unrivaled master of “virtuoso technique, the idealization of subject, [and] the ceremonial format,” drew freely from European classical models. Born into a family of icon painters descended from Ukrainian Cossacks, Borovikovsky was discovered painting allegories at one of the many palaces where passing monarchs stopped. He eventually got into the Academy. The most important portraitist of the 1790s, Borovikovsky knew how to feed the ego. Alexander Kurakin, known as “the Diamond Prince” for his vanity, had himself painted many times, including Borovikovsky’s 1802 portrait which is filled with luxurious accouterments (fig. 54). Like his brother who, as minister of internal affairs, a few years later admonished Venetsianov for his scathing cartoons about the gentry, Alexander Kurakin clearly preferred flattery to satire. The presence of Kurakin’s recently murdered friend Tsar Paul is everywhere in the Borovikovsky portrait: his bust, the Maltese cross associated with him, and—glimpsed through a window—the Mikhailovsky Castle where that tsar had lived and died.⁷⁴

Borovikovsky also excelled in the finely wrought intimacy of family scenes and in sentimental depictions of women, as in a portrait of Maria Lopukhina (1797). He displayed mastery in composition, directness, and individuality in the less common genre of “conversation pieces” with subjects of everyday cultural pursuits. He executed charming scenes of magnate families which combine graceful figures, domestic peace, and exquisite detail against a sentimentalized background of serene nature. Borovikovsky’s 1802 study of the young aristocratic Gagarina sisters, fleshy and curvy in their low-cut Empire dresses against a pastoral background, has harmonious siblings sharing music: one with a guitar, the other languorously holding the notes. It is instructive to compare it to John Smart’s 1806 watercolor, The Misses Binney, of two English sisters, also dressed in the Empire style, one looking on as the other plays the piano. Both pictures are icons of domestication and essentialized femininity in which the music is marginalized and the instruments hardly more than props.⁷⁵ In later years, Borovikovsky underwent a transformation, turning to a more austere style. His participation in a mystical cult seems to have weakened his skills and he devoted his nights to drink and his days to prayer and painting icons and crucifixion scenes for his religious friends. He died unnoticed in the home of a court chef adjacent to the Winter Palace.⁷⁶

Orest Kiprensky (1782/83-1836), a figure of great contrasts and rather alarming turbulence, was born a serf in the remote Cossack borderland around Orenburg. The illegitimate son of a bachelor officer and landowner, he was given to a foster father. In 1788, under the assumed name Kiprensky, the boy enrolled in the Academy and graduated in 1803. He spent, on and off, the years 1816-36 in Italy. While there, he took a thirteen-year-old wife whom he acquired, it was said, after murdering his mistress, the girl’s mother, by pouring turpentine on her. Kiprensky led a boisterous life in Rome and became known for his boasting and conceit. One scholar called him corrupt, rich, greedy, arrogant, and a sellout. Donskoi (1803), his first historical work, helped advance the vogue for painting Russian history. But, though seduced by Rome’s monumentality, Kiprensky ended as a superb portraitist. Among the earlier studies, the 1804 portrait of his foster father, Adam Schwalbe (Shvalbe), stands out for its realistic grimness. Kiprensky painted various statesmen such as I. A. Gagarin, Sergei Uvarov, and A. M. Golitsyn. His portrait of Pushkin (1827) became the standard likeness. A very original 1815 miniature of the poet K. N. Batyushkov has the subject’s head tilted upwards as if contemplating some metaphysical problem. The brilliant facial color and the eyes make Batyushkov seem both dreamy and creatively alert. When theater people came to be seen as worthy of portrayal on canvas, Kiprensky pioneered with portraits of the tragedienne Ekaterina Semënova and the ballerina Ekaterina Telesheva.⁷⁷

Kiprensky's portrait of the Russian officer Evgraf Davydov (1809)—brother of the famous partisan poet Denis Davydov—puts the dashing warrior of the Napoleonic epoch in a cross-legged pose, indicating self-confident insouciance, with a full-frontal head, eyes looking leftward. The serpentine pose suggests grace, bodily strength, and suppleness. Complementing the flashy uniform and the cavalry mustache, the artist painted in the accouterments of war: saber, map case, and a huge helmet lying on the floor of a veranda with a garden background. The image of a gentleman-warrior is achieved by combining the domestic interior with the outward life of a soldier. Davydov’s white breeches— losiny (elk skins)—were donned wet and then dried tight to the skin. In the field they were horribly uncomfortable as well as dangerous, due to the bright color. But in parades and portrait sittings, the effect was both martial and sensual—a key element in the attraction for women of officers of this type. Another feature that made male portraiture in this age so vivid was the shaven chin which allowed the face to come through on canvas—in striking contrast to the relative monotony of bearded visages later in the century. For hussars and uhlans (and after 1832 all officers), the permitted mustache added its own sparkle and dash. A decree of 1837 forbade facial hair except sideburns to serving officers and officials and, from 1848 to the end of Nicholas’ reign, to any nobleman. Kiprensky’s work—along with George Dawes’s portraits in the Winter Palace Gallery of Heroes—must be credited with establishing a lasting public image of the noble and romantic Russian officer.⁷⁸

Kiprensky's pair of self-portraits (c. 1808)—another turning point in the art of personal representation—seem to show two entirely different personae. One is of a wildly romantic and strikingly handsome young man with sensual lips and fierce eyes and paintbrushes perched behind his ear as he works. Although Sarabyanov described the portrait as “meditative,” it seems more like the self-revelation of a killer and seducer and drunk. The other is of a quiet clerk-like man posing with a pink scarf.⁷⁹ It seems likely that the artist was attempting to show the various sides of his complex personality. Once known as the “king of painting,” Kiprensky declined in the 1830s and few other portraitists arose to match the quality of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Kiprensky’s self-portraits, a rare genre before the nineteenth century, clearly betokened the growth of the artists’ sense of—or search for—identity and self-worth. Kiprensky’s social ambit was limited, but in going somewhat beyond portraying the elite in a restricted art of elevation, he took a small step toward something like an art of revelation. In any case, the artistic conventions and patronage mechanisms established for elite portraiture became easily adaptable to those in the merchant estate who began to seek their own special place in society worthy of representation and legitimation on canvas.

Not long ago, Britons could still get riled over attempts to “read” English landscape painting in political terms. In the last few decades, British art historians have been doing just that, with the principal focus on the ideological meanings of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landscape art. Though at odds about what the art means, they insist that the meanings transcend mere images of trees and ground.⁸⁰ Eighteenth-century British landscape artists, while bowing to esthetic and social conventions, divided over what were called occluded (or picturesque) and panoramic perspectives. The former took on specific localized scenes of nature such as a cottage in the trees, or natural events such as a rainstorm. Critics claimed that such views fit the taste of the vulgar to whom the larger view was inaccessible. Painting or viewing a picturesque scene was likened to a cramped political vision based on narrow self-interest. Conversely, the panoramic view, while suggesting scope and power, also indicated breadth of vision, a civic humanism reserved for men (and only men) of substance (landed property). The idealized panoptic perspective, which conveyed the sense of naturalness and permanence, unaffected by events, became associated with high social status, good taste, and wide learning. Thus, as in certain readings of classical drama, class hierarchy was explained by the ability of disinterested people of independent means to apprehend the abstract, the general, the universal, the essential. The art of elevation was another tool in the kit of honor along with lineage, service, patriarchy, and a willingness to duel.⁸¹

In manorial landscape painting, the “prospect” or high-angle perspective conveyed mastery—by the viewer of the picture and by the owner of the land depicted. Its archetype, Henry Hoare’s The Park at Stourhead (1743-44), places the painter and viewer on one side of a body of water and a building on the other.⁸² This arrangement became standardized throughout Europe, including Russia. There, some eighteenth-century landscapists simply copied European works directly; those who struck out on their own had to learn the rules of spacing and perspective and to deal with fore-, middle-, and background composition. They quickly became conversant with established styles, particularly those of Britain, France, and Italy. Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) long held sway over landscape both in specific devices—an arboreal “screen,” a dark coulisse of trees on one or both sides of the picture; and in mood—a quest not for topographical exactitude, but for poetic and luminous scenes, tinged with nostalgia, and littered with classical remnants in a serenely receding landscape. The relative lack of a national signature appealed to the age in which it was born, but lost some of its force when the events and processes of the early nineteenth century released a flood of national expression.⁸³

When the landscape involves property and people, organization and hierarchy, munificence and taste, then landscape art intersects with social history. The most striking thing about outdoor painting in Russia from Catherine II to Nicholas I is the relative absence of raw nature and the predominance of the manorial prospect—a privileging of landscaping over landscape. An ideology of “ruralism” came into play which self-consciously constructed the grounds of the manor house as an Eden where no one worked, or as a pastorale where real labor was concealed. Peasants were invisible; painted in as staffage, stick figures like extras on a theater stage; or occasionally seen as happy toilers like the haymakers of the theatricalized spectacles noted in the previous chapters. Painters, like the real and fictional landowners Thomas Newlin writes about, “aestheticized and pastoralized the act of labor” in order to create the “overall illusion of 'happy' rural life.” The stillness of the garden became a metaphor for social peace. Painters again and again represented the estate as an island of freedom, reflecting the release from state service that the gentry had enjoyed since the 1760s. Highlighting the refinements of civilization, as embodied in manor house architecture and formal gardens set in the midst of bucolic nature, provided an aesthetic contrast and made a cultural statement. A striking reflection of the personal construction of reality are the written thoughts and the watercolor landscapes done in the 1790s by the eighteenth-century landowner and diarist Andrei Bolotov, which contained almost no peasants.⁸⁴

It became customary for landowner patrons to invite painters in summer to their homes as, in a sense, artists in residence. Manorial painters ranged from renowned academy professors to serfs and unattached amateur artists, many of them now unknown. A socio-cultural compact emerged between patron and painter about how to re-create the manorial milieu on canvas. An early example of the genre is a 1794 view of the Kurakin estate in Saratov Province by Academy-trained Yakov Filimonov (fig. 3). In a classic elevated perspective, the viewer looks down at the seignior strolling with a guest in the foreground, pointing to his dozen buildings across a narrow river. He heads toward a boat being readied for him by retainers (probably the impoverished gentry who work for him).⁸⁵ From other sources we also know that dinner and a serf orchestra await him at the manor house. The familiar progress of pleasures is taking place: a walk in the country air, the proud display of land and property, a boat ride, repose, a grand meal served by lackeys, music played by his orchestra. All this was at the disposal of Prince Kurakin and his guests, thus adding to the host’s sensual enjoyment the refined psychic pleasure of hospitality. In this respect, a host acted the impresario, deploying unpaid labor in the entertainment of his nonpaying guests. The pleasure of having his paradise on canvas was perhaps intensified by the fact that Kurakin rarely visited it.⁸⁶

In the first half of the nineteenth century, painters replicated the pattern, adding variations specific to the particular locale: Maxim Vorobev’s 1811 depiction of Arakcheev’s famous militarized estate at Gruzino; an unknown artist’s painting (c. 1830) of the Trubetskois’ Akhtyrka estate in Moscow Province; Vasily Sternberg’s of the Tarnovsky manor in Chernigov Province (1837); the Sheremetev serf N. I. Podklyuchnikov’s of his master’s Kuskovo and Ostankino homes (1839) in Moscow; Aleksei Voloskov’s of Modest Rezvoi’s Marienhof estate in St. Petersburg Province (1846); and Stepan Galaktionov’s 1847 Lake in the Park. Anonymous undated works from the same period include a watercolor of the Bakunins’ Raikovo estate; a painting of the Orlovs’ Otrada in Moscow Province; and a canvas entitled Lakeshore Road. In all but one of these, the artists employ a high perspective and the Claudean frame and situate the manor house across a small body of the water (like fairylands across the sea in folk tales)—remote from painter and viewer, a place to be invited to and not to stumble into. The foreground varies: masters, family, guests, sometimes peasants or just cows. Even when highly idealized, touches of “realism” occur in the details (the tree leaves in Lakeshore Road could rival in verisimilitude the much-mocked pine needles of the noted Itinerant painter, Ivan Shishkin). Voloskov, a merchant’s son, offers a rendering of Marienhof that contradicts the pattern in almost every way. The viewer looks up at the modest Dutch house which is set off to the side. The center and right are filled with huts, a mill, a stream, and two peasants building a raft. The privileged place of the manor has been lost and the painting has become a picturesque landscape and genre scene.⁸⁷

The prevailing pattern in manorial painting presents a culture of pride and hospitality (pride even in the peasants at Otrada who are chopping firewood to warm the master’s home). The manorial landscape is actually the portrait of a property, set in the center, well-lighted, surrounded by props and extras who augment its centrality in the life of the owner. The strong feeling of self-esteem derived from ownership is hardly surprising in view of what we know about the affluent rural gentry’s attachment to their homes.⁸⁸ House and land, whether near or far from the capital, seemed to celebrate visually the emancipation of the gentry, to be a locus of freedom and a token of independent ownership by a lord unbeholden to the state. The apparent absence of commissioned paintings showing serf orchestras and actors on stage reveals another side of the picture. Serf owners’ delight in their entertainers, at least as strong as that of home ownership, if displayed on canvas might transform serfs into much more than stick figures and thus make them compete with or even marginalize their owners. Lords could not prevent the satires of domestic theater on the imperial stages, but they could deny representation in the art they paid for. The practice of using chattels in such ways, though acceptable to like-minded guests, ought not to be inscribed as a boast on such a permanent document as a canvas.

Scenes such as those described above were hung on the walls of manor houses as comforting tokens of ownership. A guest would thus “see” the host’s home twice, from the outside and on the inside. Except for Arakcheev’s complex at Gruzino which had multiple purposes, gentry estates were represented as sites of leisure and pleasure and not of productivity. Although we have pictures of merchants’ homes and of seigniorial and merchant factories, we have none—apparently—of the estate specifically devoted to the business of an improving landlord, even though the noted painter Venetsianov was one of these. Britons had added this theme to manorial depiction in the eighteenth century with the onset of the Agricultural Revolution, thus adding industriousness and enterprise to Arcadia—a visual account of how the gentry adapted to industrialization. The simple Arcadia gave way to a Virgilian vision of rustic life as healthy labor (regardless of who did the labor). The absence of this development in Russia can be explained by the relative paucity of modernizing landowners, the inefficiency of the few who ventured upon improvements, and the fact that such types were mocked on stage and in story.

Of course gentry outdoor pleasures could be recorded in other than a manorial setting: promenading on the streets of the capital, or on an outing in the suburbs. Ivan Khrutsky’s (1806-1852) Elagin Island (1839) features two young ladies strolling a waterside path in this exclusive suburb of opulent palaces and mansions, near the bank of one of the Neva’s branches. The two women are alone, undisturbed as if in the midst of an uninhabited wild, though they are probably denizens of one of the nearby private summer mansions or dachas. A rather rare scene in a watercolor produced in the 1840s by an in-law of the Poltoratskys in Kaluga Province has the family and a dozen peasants coming out of the estate church, each group going its own way. The juxtaposition is telling: the gentry move sedately in tight formation; the string of peasants pauses to hear one of the men engaged in an animated narrative, illustrated by broad arm gestures; in fact his figure dominates the entire picture. The treatment is indeed atypical as a portrayal of rural gentry; the artist, Ellen Southey Poltoratskaya, was an Englishwoman. A very different kind of outing is that shown in a provincial town with a fortress wall which a father is pointing out, and probably commenting on, to his two children.⁸⁹ All of this fell short of landscape in the larger sense. Once we move into a pursuit, dear to the gentry, that made contact with nature—the hunt—a “real” Russian landscape will surround and envelope them in pictorial form.

St. Petersburg has been celebrated throughout its three-hundred-year existence, among other things as the Venice of the North and “the most intentional city” (Dostoevsky), in innumerable works of poetry, prose, mythmaking, urban folklore, and graphic art. The literature on this subject is staggering.⁹⁰ St. Petersburg’s very monumentality invited the representation of urban prospects, architectural ensembles, and ceremonial crowds. Among the most literal-minded of these, Alexei Zubov’s (1682-1750) engraving A Panorama of St. Petersburg (1716) has even been called an example of imperial “socialist realism.”⁹¹ The initial entries in a collection of 231 plates dealing with the first third of the nineteenth century, Pushkin's Petersburg, reveal an overwhelming interest on the part of the mostly unidentified artists in space, parades, and linear design, executed in low horizon with an emphasis on perspective. The palaces, toy soldiers (the title of one), and princesses borne in gilded carriages drawn by six horses that were featured in some of them give the city a fairytale aspect. F. Ya. Alexeev, a veteran of the Roman pensionate, used angles, water, embankments, light, buildings, and vessels in much the same way Venetian painters had done for ages—particularly Canaletto and Guardi in the eighteenth century. In many a scene, the Neva has become the Grand Canal.⁹² The ex-serf Vasily Sadovnikov’s watercolors of 1820s present magnificent scenes of St. Petersburg in all seasons. The pink and blue skies and the pastels of the buildings soften and romanticize the cityscape which in many ways parallels manorial landscape, substituting the urban upper classes for the landowners, and the tsar’s buildings for the manor house. The lower orders are represented by an occasional hawker and the military on parade. Sadovnikov’s figures are more than staffage but less than group portraits or genre crowds. It is clear that patrons of this art did want it cluttered up with commoners; the viewer was expected to gaze with awe upon the beautiful (and beautified) Romanov edifices.⁹³

The huge open spaces and ruler-straight prospects of the capital offered an exceptionally theatrical arena for the display of machine-like parades so beloved of the Romanov emperors. The squared-off phalanxes matched the geometrical lines of the inner city, and the colorful uniforms of the marching men enlivened the scene. Three artists known more for other forms of representation, Grigory Chernetsov, Vasily Raev, and Vasily Thimm, deployed their skills at perspective and crowd scenes from the 1830s to the 1850s. Chernetsov’s Parade, October 6, 1831, on Tsaritsyn Meadow (Mars Field—1832-37) (fig. 55), was inspired by a painting by the Berlin artist Franz Krüger.⁹⁴ Chernetsov presents a panorama of the ground between the Summer Garden and the barracks on the far side of Mars Field that makes this vast space look even vaster. As another remarkable demonstration of the city’s and the tsar’s powers of display, Chernetsov’s canvas, in which some ninety thousand men and eighty-four cannons appeared in formation, captured the celebration of the recent subjection of insurrectionary Poland. Raev, while still a serf, also caught, in Parade on Palace Square (1834), the awesome symmetry of the rigidly packed formations on the huge space in front of the Winter Palace. In 1857, Thimm did a lithograph of the arrival of the bride of Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich, son of the late tsar.⁹⁵ The retinue of the bride as it processes through Palace Square wears apparel from three historical ages: the mounted guards holding back the crowd are in contemporary uniforms; the foot guards in those of 1812; and the coachman in an eighteenth-century caftan, knee breeches, and tricorn. The closer to the dynast, the deeper the tradition. The onlookers, by contrast, are virtually excluded from the picture. Yet, though the crowds at parade time were subordinated to the main cast, they were willing enough to stand for hours in order to catch sight of the imperial splendor.⁹⁶ It is worth noting that these three artists, however much later historians stressed their nonacademic activities, were in fact children of the academic tradition and quite happy to alternate their genre studies with works of classical perspective.

Classical academic painters achieved social acceptance and even celebrity in their time. Sometimes the reputation was inflated: the popular writer Mikhail Zagoskin compared historical painter Vasily Shebuev to Raphael.⁹⁷ Bruni and Bryullov, called titans in their day, awed crowds with their historical canvases. The hierarchy of genre was reflected in ranks and salaries: rectors and professors had to be historical painters. Perhaps the Russian striving to emulate European standards of excellence lent compensatory force to rigid canonization of aesthetics. In any case, Academy president Olenin, a conservative on most matters, attempted a freezing of styles at the very moment when the upsurge of romanticism and realism were draining from classicism some of its power and resonance.⁹⁸ Classicism in the arts seemed to follow the pattern of a ball which loses energy and power with every bounce. Each new wave of revival or imitation promised permanence—from the Winckelmann aesthetic craze in the eighteenth century to the Jacobin-and-Bonaparte civic phase. But for Russia, Bryullov’s Pompeii was one of the last bounces of classicism, even though the Academy pretended that the classical ball remained resilient. Ekaterina Yunge, living inside the Academy’s walls and observing the ferment of the 1830s to the 1850s, argued—like a Hegelian—that passing through the stage of classicism was inevitable for Russia. Indeed the serf painter hero of the longest novel about art from this period, A. V. Timofeev’s The Artist, a fanatical idealist, is obsessed exclusively by classical themes.⁹⁹

The decline of academic style of course had many causes. In Europe, a fall-off in the market for large battle pictures and other historical genres partly stemmed from the growing lack of private manor house space to put them in—particularly large halls which offered perspective. This became true in Russia as well, where gentry fortunes were eroding steadily and sometimes dramatically due to mismanagement and prodigal spending. In a bleak setting of auctions, bankruptcies, mortgaged property, and deserted manor homes, the taste for shepherdesses and legionaries could easily evaporate. Conversely, new social elements with different values entered the taste public and became buyers. Artists appeared who were ready to serve new clients and express their own civic and artistic views as well. As in drama, the remoteness of themes, the excess of antique anecdote, and the lack of psychological relations among characters in classical art no longer met their needs. Ideology had turned into a sociology as well. A particular European type—whom Nikolaus Pevsner called “the academic dignitary”—was well placed, part of a powerful international caste, and suspicious of modern currents that challenged established rules. The American painter J. A. M. Whistler, voicing a growing resentment toward establishments, offered the following bon mot: “Whom the gods wish to make ridiculous, they make Academicians.”¹⁰⁰

The noted Russian art historian Dmitry Sarabyanov lamented the long classical hold on Russian art.¹⁰¹ Its tenacity is partly explained by the fact that the great magnates in Russia, as in Europe, ordered and bought historical canvases because they reflected cultural capital—the owner’s ability to “read” art at a high level of symbolic meaning. As with classical drama, catering to embodiments of ancient heroes implied both status and lofty moral character. On a more practical level, collecting such works generated a collective sense of status and cultural connections.¹⁰² But the “decline” of the classical style, like that of neoclassical theater, was not a simple career downward while something else replaced it. In the last decades of prereform Russia, it was difficult to differentiate among classic, romantic, sentimental, or realist because they so often merged, mixed, or combined. Classicism bore many “alien” traits, and many classicisms existed side by side. Some of the European styles that simultaneously poured into Russia were themselves syntheses. Late classicism was loaded with storm and stress; romantics employed classical rules and realistic effects; the realists unwittingly employed idealization. Turbulent forces of nature such as raging seas, forbidding mountain peaks, terrifying abysses, dark forests, mysterious caves, sinister shapes, and picturesque ruins could serve as footnotes to antiquity or sites of danger from an alien past. The sheer eclecticism of the era was reflected in Odoevsky’s 1839 tale “The Painter,” whose title character is reduced to poverty and to painting only grocery signs. His tragedy, more subtle than that of victimized serf artists, stems not from social injustice: the artist, unable to master or synthesize all the imported images he has been learning, goes mad.¹⁰³

The “academic vista,” as critics have long pointed out, had a surfeit of blind spots. In obeying European conventions of high art, most of the professional painters for a long time settled on the received motifs of “historical” drama drawn from inherited stories and myths of the Hebrew, classical, and Christian past, largely neglecting themes of Russian history; on flattering parade portraits or scenes from upper-class family life, excluding most other classes as objects of representation; and on topographical works that exalted the palaces and the houses and grounds of nobles, ignoring for the most part the sweep and roughness of Russian nature and urban blight. A prominent Soviet critic of the academic mode, Savinov, even when writing in post-Stalin times, pronounced the Academy a powerful center of ruinous influence on art and its faculty for the most part mediocre, marred by adherence to unoriginal classicism and “sweet-salon” works. The Academy, he said, generated skills that often ended in lack of inspiration and a cosmopolitan style of interchangeable features. The judgment was not unique to Soviet critics. The learned Baron Wrangel was hardly kinder to the Academy which he saw as promoting neither national nor individual expression but rather as using an imported template when assigning students various genres and subjects.¹⁰⁴

These verdicts, though accurate in the main, need some qualification. Even Savinov admits that one of the academicians he denounces was a justly popular professor who took teaching seriously and gave students some scope. Savinov aside, historians of Russian art—paralleling those of music on the issue of the Mighty Five—no longer accept the mythologizing of the Itinerants by their chief propagandist V. V. Stasov and countless other scholars who, in exalting the undeniable achievements of their favorite school, were led to an unjustifiable denunciation of the Academy in black-and-white terms. The Academy produced a great deal of good art and some great works as well. More important, it provided the needed discipline and training that helped launch the careers of those who would revolt against it. Already in the 1840s, even some conservative professors were allowing pupils such as Thimm, Rizzoni, and Fedotov to pursue their own inclinations toward genre and everyday life.¹⁰⁵ In later years, the Academy began to relax the rigid examination programs and their mandatory historical thematics and allow some genre subjects. None the less, the fact remains that because of the Academy’s state attachment, its conservative faculty, its entrenched pedagogical traditions, and its excessive bending to Western models, it was inevitable that, to some viewers, the word “academic” came to mean mediocre, dry, cold, antiquated, irrelevant, uninspired, artificial, and historically detached from the creator and the place of creation. Artists in and outside the academy’s walls would seek out other means of expression and would turn their eyes to objects closer to hand.

Seeing Art, Talking Art

If theater people exhibited themselves, artists showed—or tried to show—their art. Yet only a tiny proportion of the Russian population ever saw, bought, read about, or talked of fine art as then defined by the Academy, particularly oil canvases or watercolors. Some peasants could gaze for themselves at manor houses and garden sculptures; and house serfs could, as did the budding serf artist Tropinin, see the pictures on the manor houses’ walls. The rest knew graphic art only through lubok, icon, or book illustration. The same applied to the urban lower classes. The gentry, educated classes, and burgeoning intelligentsia had vastly divergent viewing experiences, depending on when and where they lived. At one extreme, a literate official or landowner in a faraway provincial estate or town at the beginning of the century saw only the paintings he or his neighbors owned or those in the homes of wealthy friends whom he might visit in the capitals. Specialized publications on art were few. At the other extreme, a grandee in St. Petersburg could commission his own paintings, maintain a gallery, and visit the Hermitage, the Academy of Arts, and the private collections of other magnates. Only the select few had access to the opulent collections of the Yusupovs and Stroganovs. The Rumyantsev collection, donated to the state, was opened “to those of good background” from 1831. It later moved to Moscow. In 1846, Alexander Kushelëv-Bezborodko allowed public viewing of the picture collection in his home in St. Petersburg for two hours on Thursdays. It was not until 1862 that his son Nikolai bequeathed his part of the collection to the Academy on the stipulation that there be no restrictions or dress code for visitors. The Moscow Golitsyns established a gallery in 1810 that admitted the public except for peasants and “those shod in bast shoes.” It lasted only six years. Zinaida Volkonskaya tried unsuccessfully to start a museum of copies of Western art at Moscow University in the 1820s. The Society for the Encouragement of Artists tried to found a Russian museum in 1824 but failed for lack of funds.¹⁰⁶

The Imperial Hermitage collection in the Winter Palace had been established in 1764 by Empress Catherine II who sent purchasing agents to Europe. Russian rulers guarded the privacy of their residence, even though it contained eleven hundred rooms. By 1840 when the Hermitage was first opened to a limited public, it contained about four thousand paintings and thirty thousand engravings. Nicholas I made numerous purchases for the Hermitage from France, Italy, and Germany. Though Nicholas deserves much credit for the architectural masterpieces erected or begun in his reign, his record is mixed in regard to painting. A stubborn art lover, he clung to his own taste—intimate genre as well as battle and parade canvases—and would brook no correction from advisors such as Fëdor Bruni. The tsar’s favorite painter was Franz Krüger, a major figure of German Biedermeier. Nicholas’ manner of acquisition was idiosyncratic. As Baron Wrangel’s 1912 archival study revealed, the tsar was also often destructive. In the 1850s he sold off at auction for a pittance hundreds of paintings, including valuable works by European masters. He also had paintings banished from the Hermitage collection and even burned. These included portraits of the lovers of his grandmother Catherine II, whose reign he detested; of the Decembrist rebels; and of anyone he did not like. Walking through the Hermitage one day and seeing Houdon’s bust of Voltaire, he gave the order: “Destroy that ape.” After suppressing the Polish uprising of 1830, the tsar had estates of the Polish nobility plundered and their art treasures, including fifty-five pieces from the Sapieha estate, brought to his palace. In 1834, as an act of revenge, he had many incinerated.¹⁰⁷

Until 1840, only invited elites and vetted academy professors and students saw the Hermitage collections. When in 1840 the Hermitage did open to the public, it was to a limited public. A rule that ticket holders must wear black frock coats and white gloves automatically excluded the lower classes and many a notch or so higher. Taras Shevchenko needed a ticket and an escort to gain entry. In 1852, the Hermitage was declared a public museum, though an entrance fee remained. The well-known painter of the Itinerant school Nikolai Ge (1831-94) recalled that even in the 1850s he felt constantly watched, and he feared being thrown out because of his modest apparel. Only in 1863 was the public admitted free of charge.¹⁰⁸

The Academy of Arts displayed hardly more generosity to the public than the other imperial institutions that were in various ways supposed to serve society. The Imperial Public Library, where Olenin presided from 1808 to 1843, opened only three days a week to well-dressed gentlemen and lovers of learning. Reader data for the first decades of the century are sketchy: in 1850, some 8,000, and in 1858, 35,000 visitors patronized the library. As for art viewing, the poet Konstantin Batyushkov left an amusing account of a “stroll through the Academy of Arts” in 1814 whose main point was to praise the Academy, its founders and leaders, and its Russian artists. The narrator, though learned in and respectful of European art, was quick to poke fun at those who saw beauty and grandeur only on foreign shores or in deep antiquity. As one of the characters asks: “is breathing the air of Rome indispensable for the artist, for the lover of antiquity?” Batyushkov’s sketch left a somewhat exaggerated impression that the halls of the Academy were regularly visited by very engaged and well-informed people of various ages and tastes, and the scene suggested that the building was a natural venue for cultural debate in a public space beyond the salon.¹⁰⁹

In fact, the Academy only mounted irregular shows every one to three years in September and October. Under Olenin, they were accompanied by the wining and dining of moneyed patrons who might contribute to his budget and buy paintings. Fragmentary glimpses suggest what the shows were like. One in 1820 was packed with lower-class people from the street. Apparently such visitors were segregated: in 1827 Nikitenko witnessed a crowd of “ordinary folk,” since those of “good breeding” came in the morning. The Academy offering was far from brilliant. The traveler Thomas Raikes in 1829 saw “very few objects of interest or importance” and “few good paintings.” Art students and professors had to visit other places such as the Hermitage to see the great masters. The sculptor Ramazanov recalled that up to 183 3, the Academy was a closed institution divorced from the life of the great capital, with the artists inside and the public outside. The periodic showings generated large crowds and a flurry of discussion in society of the latest works. But then the talk would die away until the next triennial. In between came only a small trickle of foreign visitors and scholars. After the showing of Bryullov’s Last Day of Pompeii in 1833, the doors swung open and public interest grew. The dawn of realism in the 1840s and the era preceding emancipation brought even greater public attention.¹¹⁰

Art museums, writes a modern scholar, provide “a way of seeing,” and “the museum effect” turns objects into works of art. A museum can also turn “bad” art into art. Varying modes of hanging, lighting, and grouping—by genre, author, period, style, or school—will affect the way pictures are seen and understood, aside from what the public has read or heard about the paintings. The shows of the Academy functioned this way but on a very limited scale. As a school and not an art museum, the Academy offered mostly the works of professors and students. It thus lacked the symbolic (though not the physical) monumentality of a permanent collection. It was a place where judgments were necessarily conditional, lacking the long-range canonical power that a museum can endow upon its holdings. Yet, though the Academy was weak in the exhibition of art to the public, it reached out widely in other ways through its outpost in Rome, its staffing of ordinary schools all over the empire with art teachers, and its relations with the growing network of “independent” provincial schools (chapter 8). For the capital, the Academy offered a pool of painters, architects, and sculptors who built and decorated state and private structures—the palaces, lions, horses, and sphinxes that came to adorn St. Petersburg in that time and which gave the city its world renown.¹¹¹

Thus seeing art remained for the most part the perquisite of those who could buy it, and of their guests. No real art market emerged in the preemancipation years, though certainly art was bought and sold. Churchmen such as Metropolitan Mikhail Desnitsky could order a portrait from Borovikovsky, but most orders came from court, gentry, and rich merchants. Though some grandees preferred European old masters, well-known families such as the Shuvalovs, Orlovs, Golitsyns, Kurakins, Gagarins, Lvovs, and Naryshkins were buying works of well-established Russian artists—Borovikovsky, Tropinin, and Bryullov, among others. In the 1820s, at least three art shops operated on the Nevsky, including Snegirev’s, where Bryullov and others exhibited in the 1820s. But the buying usually took place by personal contact, at the Academy or through the Society for the Encouragement of Artists.¹¹² Inevitably some artists never made it at all or declined after the first flush. K. L. Pzhetslavsky’s (Przeclawski, 1820-62) little-known painting, The Poor Artist’s Family and a Buyer (1857), bitterly depicted the pathos and humiliation that some artists felt about the market. On the canvas, the defeated painter appeals with a gesture to the kindness of a rich buyer, pointing to the destitution surrounding his mother, wife, and small child.¹¹³

One can speak of a journalistic discourse on art only in the reign of Nicholas I. Rosalind Gray’s fine survey of the subject discusses the Journal of Fine Arts (1823-25) and the Gazette of Fine Arts (1836-41), which focused largely on European works. Messenger of Europe (1802-30), Northern Flowers (1825-32), Annals of the Fatherland from 1839, and other thick journals published irregularly on the arts. Nestor Kukolnik, editor of the Gazette of Fine Arts from 1836 to 1839, endeavored to avoid controversy and criticism, pointed aspiring Russian artists to Rome, and argued that Russian art was hardly more than a local variant of the Italian Renaissance as represented in the religio-Italianate works of Bruni and Bryullov, among others.¹¹⁴ As of that moment, Kukolnik was essentially correct: the Russian world of art was a European world in terms of style, patronage, taste, discourse, public exposure, and pedagogical approaches. In this it paralleled opera, ballet, and classical concert music. Only in the 1840s did the discussion of Russian art come to maturity in illustrated journals and collections and in art criticism. By that time, the art world itself was turning a new corner.