8

Exploring the Interior

"Who would want to paint you when no one even wants to look at you?" an old epigrammatist [Antiochus in Anthologia Graeca ] asks of an exceedingly deformed man. Many an artist of our time would say, "Be as ugly as possible, I will paint you nevertheless. Even though no one likes to look at you, they will still be glad to look at my picture, not because it portrays you but because it is a proof of my art, which knows how to present such a monster so faithfully.''

—Lessing, Laocoon

Russian artists of the early and mid-nineteenth century set out on voyages of discovery: of their country’s interior landscape; of the intérieur or domestic dwelling space of diverse social classes; of the “inner city” beyond the majestic squares of the capitals; and sometimes even of their own internal selves and those of their artistic subjects. The term “discovery” might well be replaced by “revelation” or “reinvention,” since some artists were driven by various motives; and since they idealized what they “discovered” as did their predecessors, though in a new way.¹ No dramatic break with academia can explain the outward journey to the provinces and the inward gaze at everyday life and labor. Academy-trained artists, or those linked to it personally and intellectually, engaged in a slow and laborious process. The pioneers of discovery

worked not by abandoning European traditions but by choosing which traditions to draw from and applying them freely.² One might even say that Europe provided them with a searchlight to hunt out Russia. While there is truth in the picture of students abandoning the gloomy recesses of the edifice on the Neva, they did not forswear all they had learned there. Rather they built on it.

As part of their discovery, artists moved into new genres and graphic media, including photography, and upgraded previously low-rated ones. And they moved physically into new art environments: dark spaces of the urbs and remoter corners of the countryside. The school of naturalism or realism that grew during the 1830s and 1840s, by offering representations of the here and now, led some people to visualize who they were and what they were in relation to others. By the early nineteenth century, virtually every province of Russia contained a swirl of painters and sketchers from the capital, roving artists, and artist colonies in places like Tver, Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Arzamas, Saratov, Penza, Voronezh, Kaluga, the Urals, and Siberia.³ New art schools—in both senses of the word: training centers and styles—arose in the provinces and in Moscow, which flung painters out of the studios into the countryside to gaze at the previously invisible, to see and represent what traditional artists were blind to. Art outside the capital was quickened by the ever-widening social perspective of the painters who worked there and of the human experience depicted. Paralleling these developments and partly related to them was the struggle for the liberation of serf artists and for an upgrading of the status of artists in general.

Counter-Academy?

A half-dozen art centers far from the Academy of Arts served collectively as minor vehicles for the spread of secular art in the countryside, promoted a new view of the world, and trained serfs and other lower-class artists. Provincial art schools arose in a dozen places, though those in Kharkov, Kazan, Tambov, Tiflis, and Feodosia were stillborn. Alexander Stupin (1776?-1861) opened the first private nonseigniorial art school in Arzamas. The illegitimate son of a nobleman, Stupin in the 1790s became an independent icon painter. Ambitious to be a teacher, he enrolled in the Academy of Arts in 1800, earned a silver medal, and, through the intercession of Director Stroganov, won gentry social status and received two hundred rubles for his journey back home to Arzamas. In 1802 Stupin turned his house into a school which he eventually furnished with thousands of books and pictures. He recognized a big demand for art in Arzamas, which stood at a crossroads in the province of Nizhny Novgorod. Stupin’s school enjoyed the official protection of the governor; and from 1809, when Stupin became an Academician, his institution was associated with the Academy of Arts. By 1830, of the seventy-five Arzamas graduates, twelve had entered the Academy (ten of whom won silver medals), and thirteen had gone into teaching.⁴

The Arzamas school offered Russian, geography, history, and theatrical art. Stupin taught classical painting and landscape, using purchased busts and pictures for copying exercises. His son, Rafael (b. 1798), who, while attending the Academy of Arts, had met the great tragedian A. S. Yakovlev, organized a school theater, open to the public, where Goldoni and Ozerov were performed. In art classes, he at first stood nude models in classical poses, and then shifted, in ways unthinkable at the Academy, to having them pose in everyday motions such as chopping wood and carrying bags, a method that exposed unfamiliar muscles and also was related to acts of labor. Students paid tuition for the six-year course and lived in a special dormitory. Out of this training came thousands of portraits as well as secular and religious works that were marketed in several directions. The school took orders for iconostases and sent its art works to the Nizhny Novgorod fair. Stupin called his institution the School of Historical and Portrait Painting in order to get gentry landowners to enroll their serfs and townsmen their sons. Open to all classes and without age restrictions, it attracted many serfs, 60 of the estimated 150 total enrollees.⁵

The serf painter Ivan Zaitsev (1805-87), a graduate, later recalled the kindness of the director and the staff. In contrast to other schools with lower-class pupils, a communal atmosphere prevailed. “There was no distinction between [serf and free],” wrote Zaitsev. “We lived—as they say—like soul brothers, each ready to die for the other.” Like other serfs who received some education, Zaitsev looked back with bitterness on his servile childhood in Penza Province. His father had made erotic pictures at the command of one landowner. Another, a bachelor, would lie in bed, scan the latest list of his serfs, and summon one of the teenaged girls to his chamber. Under a new master, in 1824 Zaitsev was permitted to enroll at Arzamas where he experienced three happy years. When his master’s estate was sold, Zaitsev, assisted by Stupin, won his freedom and entered the Academy of Arts from which he graduated in 183 5 to become a teacher. Other Arzamas serf pupils got their freedom, including Vasily Raev, I. M. Gorbunov (d. 1837), Shevchenko’s tyrannical boss in Petersburg, V. G. Shiryaev (b.1795), and two founders of their own schools: Kuzma Makarov and Afanasy Nadezhdin. Not all serf pupils were so lucky. A landowner declined the offer of two thousand rubles made to him by the Society for the Encouragement of Artists for the freedom of Grigory Myasnikov, an Arzamas serf pupil. Ordered into domestic service and denied aspirations to attend the Academy of Arts, in 1828 he killed himself and left a note containing the words: ''Write on my tomb that I died for freedom."⁶

In 1836 Stupin passed the directorship to a pupil. Tension apparently existed with the local community. After Myasnikov’s suicide, some police officials wanted to close the school. Stupin claimed that a fire that destroyed it in 1843 was started by evil-minded people out of either envy or a desire to plunder. We can only speculate about whether discontent was fed by the employment of nude models, a dormitory full of serf artists, the school theater where boys dressed up as girls, or the use of plaster statues, scandalizing at least one local priest who saw them as idols. Perhaps it was the presence of the one female student, Mariya Zhukova, later a well-known writer. In any case, in 1843 Stupin rebuilt the school after the fire. But by the 1840s, when Vladimir Sollogub had Arzamas art serve as the symbol of tradition in his Slavophile utopian novel The Coach, the school was already in decline due to change in tastes and the dwindling of interest in paintings “without ideas.” So landowners stopped training their serfs in “useless” art and put them to work. Stupin died in 1861, having spent six decades promoting art education. His school ended in the following year. Arzamas, as the first provincial school, produced no outstanding painters. Its significance lies in the role it played as the earliest haven for serf painters outside manor house and Academy, the freedom it won for a handful of pupils, and the schools it spawned.⁷

The students of Alexei Venetsianov (1780-1847) at his Safonkovo school in Tver Province achieved greater notoriety. Descended from a Greek family, Venetsianov, the son of a Moscow noble working as a fruit dealer, moved to St. Petersburg in 1807. Though Venetsianov never studied officially at the Academy of Arts, he had connections to it. As a full-time civil servant for decades, he studied irregularly under Borovikovsky, used live models, and copied at the Hermitage. Venetsianov’s 250 works include a large number of portraits, but in 1828, he wrote a goodbye note to portraiture and never did another.⁸ Venetsianov retired to his estate in 1819 and began painting peasants. “I busied myself,” he said, “with the production of the simplest and crudest of Russian subjects.” “The art of drawing and painting itself is nothing more than a weapon assisting literature and thus the enlightenment of the people.” Nature, “in its splendid guise,” became his subject.⁹ A Soviet work exaggerated only slightly when it dubbed him “the first in the history of Russian art to see the poetic content in scenes from surrounding life, in the Russian peasants and their labor.”¹⁰ For all his ruralism and protopopulism, Venetsianov always recognized the need for technique. He may have abandoned the philosophy of the Academy of Arts to strike out on his own, but he never repudiated it. In fact he even tried for a post there. After a profitable sale of a painting, he established a school on his estate in 1824 which lasted until his death in 1847. Venetsianov was the first who tried both to paint real serfs and to teach them as well.

Venetsianov's school did not emerge in a vacuum. He had debuted in teaching the lower classes at the literacy society of the Union of Welfare in St. Petersburg, a philanthropic body of the post-Napoleonic era that fed into the revolutionary Decembrist movement. From 1818 onward, Venetsianov spent summers at the Safonkovo school and winters in St. Petersburg, giving classes in his studio there. At Safonkovo, he tried some agricultural improvements¹¹ and surrounded himself with mostly serf and lower-class art pupils, eventually numbering seventy to eighty. Safonkovo resembled an artist’s studio rather than an academy. The master paid the expenses, with some assistance from the Society for the Encouragement of Artists (see below). When he could afford it, he boarded pupils. The sociable Venetsianov regaled them at dinner with talk about art. “His family was our family,” recalled one of his successful pupils, Apollon Mokritsky or Mokhritsky. The Venetsianov home also served as the “interior” that his pupils painted. Reflecting his desire for the pupils to see and paint familiar things, at Safonkovo the teaching began with objects, sculptures, and life studies before proceeding into the outdoors.¹²

By the master’s estimate, about half his pupils became good artists. Some pursued genre; others “defected” to academicism. Art historian Alexeeva lists about fifty definite and probable disciples. Among the nonserfs were Alexander Denisov; Nikifor Krylov who won an Academy medal in 1827; Alexander Alexeev who later became a drawing teacher; Evgraf Krendovsky who attended Arzamas, Safonkovo, and the Academy; Lavr Plakhov (1810-81), who studied at the Academy and at Berlin and became a pioneer in urban scenes and photography; and Evgeny Zhitnev (1809 or 1811-1860). The last painted himself in 183 3 in black tailcoat, pink waistcoat, white shirt, and black cravat—a complete European. Venetsianov assisted seven of his serf pupils to freedom by raising redemption money through lotteries and exercising his persuasive powers on serf owners. Among other onetime serfs who studied with him were G. A. Krylov, and Fëdor Slavyansky who gained freedom in 1838 and earned the title Artist at the Academy. Another, Grigory Mikhailov (1814-67), borrowed money from Venetsianov to buy his freedom and then switched over to study with Bryullov as a history painter and society portraitist. In a reverse direction, Sergei Zaryanko took Venetsianov’s “realism” to great lengths as a professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he taught and inspired some of the Itinerants. With Venetsianov’s death at age sixty-eight, the school vanished. The stylistic school of its pupils lived on.¹³

Two serf graduates of Arzamas founded provincial offshoots. Little is known about Kuzma Makarov (c. 1778-1862), a serf of the Gorikhvostovs (perhaps the Penza family who ran a serf theater). As a boy, Makarov was apprenticed to another serf painter, won his freedom on the death of his owner, enrolled at Arzamas, and earned a major silver medal in 1828. In the same year he founded a school in Saransk about which there survive few details, except that a fire destroyed it in the 1840s. In the early 1850s, he moved it to Penza in “a spacious house full of busts and pictures on a quiet street near the Church of the Nativity.” To support his activity, he and his pupils painted frescos and icons for local churches. The Petersburg Academy began to sponsor the school, but another fire struck in 1859 and Makarov died a few years later. The serf A. D. Nadezhdin graduated from Arzamas in 1825 with a silver medal, and prior to receiving his freedom, around 1831 founded a School of Drawing and Painting in Kozlov, Tambov Province. The Academy of Arts, recognizing the quality of his students, began sponsoring it in 1836. Kozlov resembled Arzamas in its output of genre, portraits, and interiors as well as church iconostases and frescos; but the student body was socially broader than in other provincial establishments. Graduates included (of those identified by social class): a female landowner, Sofia Bekhtereva (two other women were not identified by social station); one merchant each of the second and third ranks; six townsmen; two free peasants; one state peasant; and eight serfs. Of the known career outcomes, nine became independent artists, eight district school art teachers, and five Academy students. Of the eight serf pupils, one was expelled, four were returned to their owners before finishing, one became a district school art teacher, and two won the title Artist. The director Nadezhdin, bemoaning the tyranny of patronage, stated that “splendor [in art] must be the fruit of freedom, triumphing over material things and not beholden to them,” a notable case of shifting the discourse from juridical freedom to artistic freedom. Though racked with money problems, the school was still functioning in the 1860s.¹⁴

Even more striking in social makeup was the Public School of Painting Techniques, founded in Kiev in 1850 by Napoleon Buyalsky.¹⁵ A man of means, Buyalsky studied in Berlin, Dusseldorf, and Paris with a specialty in history and portraiture. He won an unclassed certificate from the Petersburg Academy in 1846 and two years later built a school in Kiev. Since he could get art supplies only from St. Vladimir University, Buyalsky tried for a slot there and was turned down for lack of proper credentials. But the Academy endorsed his school and in 1850 it opened with permission from the Kiev civil governor. The class of 1851 contained eleven nobles (including one identified as a landowner), one "officer" (presumably nonnoble), and two townsmen—a major contrast to student bodies elsewhere.

Though Moscow hardly fits the term “provincial,” it seemed that way as far as art was concerned to a visitor in 1838 who stated baldly: “There is almost no art in Moscow.”¹⁶ The visitor misspoke. True, until the 1830s, Moscow had neither an accredited art school nor public exhibition space; its picture collections were spread over the city in private hands. But during that decade the foundations were laid for the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1843) which would make the old capital a major center of Russian art that rivaled the younger capital. The numerous Moscow amateur artists and graduates of the Petersburg Academy desired mutual contact. “Moscow is the center of our manufacturing activity,” declared one of them; “it should also be the center of our efforts to establish and spread good taste and a love for elegance.”¹⁷ In 1832, E. I. Makovsky, an amateur and the father of four artists, formed the Moscow Art Society; Governor General D. V. Golitsyn, a cultivated art patron, secured a meeting place. The society launched the Moscow Life Class in 1832, which exhibited once or twice a week from two rented rooms. Its opening show in 1833 was the city’s first public exhibition. A year later, the life class was renamed the Moscow Art Class (fig. 56).

Like a good many enterprises in Imperial Russia, the new school illustrated the tight cooperation possible between local government and private personages. Golitsyn organized a group of patrons who, for a donation of 250 rubles per year, could each enroll two pupils of their choice, free or serf. At a modest tuition rate, pupils of both sexes and all social classes took ten hours of drawing and eighteen of painting at a large rented apartment in the center of the city. Sixty-five enrolled in the first year. The first director, M. F. Orlov, ex-Decembrist and friend of Venetsianov, promoted an atmosphere less formal and more socially diverse than the Academy’s. The Moscow Art Class trained artists, got them jobs and medals, and obtained freedom for a few serfs. In 1843, Orlov’s successor, ex-civil governor of Moscow I. G. Senyavin (Sinyavin), appealed to Tsar Nicholas to make the class a branch of the Petersburg Academy. The tsar replied that there was no need for a second Academy of Arts, much less one in Moscow. But he did agree to permit the opening of a “school” (uchilishche) which eventually attained the title Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.¹⁸

The major issues in the history of this school—its relationship with the Academy of Arts, its social composition, and the nature of the art produced there—together represent a case study of redefinition by rejection, a familiar feature in the growth of national cultural identity. Relations with the Academy revolved around Moscow’s right to award medals and attendant privileges. The Academy permitted Moscow to grant only unclassed or Free Artist degrees to its graduates which afforded exemption from enserfment and from lower-class liabilities. In 1859, during the drafting of a new charter that would have made the Moscow School virtually independent of Petersburg, the sculptor Ramazanov argued that “Moscow has its own university, seminary, high schools, a self-governing architectural school, a Stroganov school with its own privileges—so why not an independent school of painting and sculpture? All enlightened Muscovites desire it.” The charter was vetoed. The professional edifice of the Moscow art scene thus remained uncrowned and the school stayed subservient and unequal to the Academy of Arts.¹⁹ The question of admitting serfs received a similar resolution. Earlier, when reviewing the charter of the Moscow Art Committee, Academy officials invoked Olenin’s view that “the mixing of free and unfree pupils in the Academy caused among them all kinds of disorder and immoral behavior. And experience has shown that almost none of the serf pupils turned out to be well-behaved.” When Moscow’s charter came up for review in 1843, it allowed for equal education of free and serf artists. The Ministry of the Court removed the clause on serfs and reiterated the rule of 1817: no serfs to be admitted; exceptions required a declaration by the owner that, if the pupil earned a silver medal from the Academy, he would automatically be free. Olenin himself, now on the eve of retirement, was lukewarm to the Moscow School and viewed it as no different from all other provincial schools.²⁰ Thus any dream that some organizers might have had about creating a “school for freedom” faded, though it was not wholly expunged.

Moscow succeeded in retaining serfs (presumably with the required documentation) and many other members of the lower classes as well. In 1856, five years before the emancipation of the serfs, the 427 students constituted a body of great social and geographical diversity: townsmen, 195; officers of higher rank, 52; merchants, 43; freed serfs, 34; artisans, 23; serfs, 22; state peasants, 15; military and civil officials, 14; foundlings, 8; clergy, 8; foreigners, 6; house serfs, 4; Finns, 3; and one soldier on indefinite leave. Though place of origin is not tabulated for all, it is probably safe to assume that most students came from Moscow and the Russian heartland, though some hailed from the Solovetsky Islands, Siberia, Astrakhan, the Don region, Crimea, and Poland. Among the foreigners were one each from Mount Athos and Istanbul in the Ottoman Empire. No explanation is given for the categories “officers of higher rank” or “military and civil officials.” The Moscow School was three-fourths filled with the lower classes studying together with over a hundred of the more or less privileged, a striking contrast to the Petersburg Academy where the lower strata at that time formed less than a third of the student body. In both schools, townspeople swamped all the rest, in the case of Moscow almost half the student body. Perhaps in response to this, Governor General Zakrevsky in 1858 attempted to limit lower-class enrollment.²¹ A mystical aura of Russianism informed the imagery around the school from the very beginning. The appeals for greater demographic democracy resonated with the rhetoric of the Slavophiles and Official Nationalists who adopted the school as an emerging center of national expression. Its opening in 1843 featured a student-faculty exhibition. In his inaugural speech as director, Senyavin dwelt upon the national spirit and character of the works displayed and spoke of the national face of Moscow, “where the physiognomy of the people, the monuments of antiquity, and historical memories all summon the fine arts to new discoveries.” In a rhapsody reminiscent of the Official Nationalist Mikhail Pogodin’s letter equating Russia’s vastness with greatness, Senyavin exalted “Russian nature,” which “combines all the world’s climates, the translucent colors of the north, and the gently tinged hues of our natural vistas in the south. For our landscapists, there is available every kind of transition—from the frosty winter sky of the north to the sultry sky of the southern climes.” For Senyavin, the subject of art was an eternal Russia that expected its children to capture its majestic beauties. With a lament far more typical of the intelligentsia than of a high-ranking tsarist official, Senyavin observed that “those Russian talents, of course, are latent in the Russian people, still hidden and lacking development.”²² In the wake of his rebuffed appeal for equality with the Academy of Arts, Senyavin’s speech amounted to a manifesto exalting Moscow over St. Petersburg and Russian over cosmopolitan and academic art. His allusion to the native talents of the “people” (narod) clearly included the lower classes. Senyavin was no radical proponent of the critical realism that was unfolding in Russian art. Rather he was urging the expansion of a purely positive depiction of the beauties of the motherland and its people.

Moscow, the home of Slavophilism, had by this time also become the unofficial center of the Petersburg ideology of Official Nationalism. As such, it provided a natural hearth for the warming glow of Russianism. The Slavophile Alexei Khomyakov and the Official Nationalist Stepan Shevyrëv (along with his colleague Pogodin) were already eroding the differences that divided the two intellectual streams over some issues of Russia’s future. Within a few years, they would forge their nationalist organ, The Muscovite, into a cultural synthesis around the new drama of peasants and merchants. In 1843, Khomyakov and Shevyrëv were serving on the board of the Moscow School. The Muscovite covered the opening exhibit on December 5, 1843, lauding national works on display, such as The Russian Boy, and thereby implying that a “natural” style equaled a “national” content. In a letter written the same year, Khomyakov advised artists to emulate Gogol and be inspired by “feeling, thoughts, and forms exclusively from the depths of their souls, from the treasure house of contemporary life.” In 1845 Shevyrëv, in a lecture series on the lives of Renaissance artists, managed to weave national themes into his discussion of classicism.²³

To what extent was the discursive tone of these inaugural anthems translated into art? They seem to have had little direct impact on the faculty, whose training backgrounds ranged from the smaller provincial schools to the Academy’s branch in Rome. F. S. Zavyalov (1811-56), the history painting professor, executed biblical themes in cold, classical European style. The portraitist Apollon Mokritsky (1811-70), who had studied with Venetsianov, became a fierce disciple of Bryullov and financed his own way to Italy. In the manner of academics who identify intellectual vitality with refined nostalgia and the culture of their youth in sacralized places, Mokritsky filled his lectures at the Moscow School with reminiscences of Bryullov, Rome, and the “noble style.” Vasily Tropinin, the most celebrated Muscovite painter of the time, now an old man, played a minor role at the school by advising in portraiture. Sergei Zaryanko (1818-70), another pupil of Venetsianov and of the Academy, taught in Moscow from 1856 to his death. His pupil, Vasily Perov, quoted him as saying: “Gentlemen, art in general is no more than imitation, that is, the attempt to imitate nature.” The artist’s goal is achieved “only by way of mathematical precision of copying.” Zaryanko, though pedantic and intolerant of laxity and dreaminess—a Stolz to the school’s Oblomovs—did not, as some believed, rigidly stifle the spontaneity of pupils. Landscape was taught by Skotti (Scotti, 1814-61), an Academy of Arts-trained painter of Italian ancestry who produced somewhat lifeless works on non-Russian themes; and by K. I. Rabus, a pupil of Maxim Vorobev.²⁴

Though the senior professors followed academic values, their students carved out a divergent expressive path. Vasily Khudyakov, the only one in the 1840s to get a major silver medal, painted Finnish Smugglers, one of the first Russian purchases of the merchant patron Pavel Tretyakov. P. M. Shmelkov produced Reading the Gospel in a Country Church (1844) and a canvas depicting a soldier recounting his deeds, a theme taken up by other Moscow pupils. The big figure who radicalized genre painting was, of course, Vasily Perov (see chapter 9). The two most famous Moscow alumni who joined the later Itinerant school were Alexei Savrasov (1830-97) and Ivan Shishkin (1832-98), both of merchant families. The Moscow-born Savrasov as a youth sold landscapes, studied that genre at the Moscow School, graduated in 1850, became an Academician, and made a name by painting the dacha of Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, then president of the Academy. In 1857, he replaced Rabus in landscape painting and was later canonized for his 1871 masterpiece, The Rooks Have Returned.²⁵

Even more celebrated in his time, Shishkin was born in distant Vyatka Province. On his arrival in Moscow, he saw oil canvases for the first time in his life, and was inspired to capture fields and outdoor scenes on the land the way Ivan Aivazovsky (Gaivazovsky, 1817-1900) was doing for the sea. Shishkin began in still semirural Moscow neighborhoods, sketching old churches and suburban parks, and then moving into the forests. While studying at the Moscow School under Mokritsky, Shishkin obtained permission from the Ministry of the Court to travel to his ancestral home in Vyatka to exhibit his works—the nucleus of the idea later developed by the Itinerants. On graduating in Moscow, he studied under Vorobev at the St. Petersburg Academy in 1856-60. Shishkin later made a reputation as the Knight Artist of the Woods and King of the Forest, though sarcastic critics would someday call him “the accountant of pine trees.” These brief career sketches suggest that the impulse toward genre and naturalistic landscape came as much from within the artists as from any ideologically driven program of the Moscow School (Savrasov and Shishkin got their final training at the Academy, and the latter in Europe as well.)²⁶

The historians Moleva and Belyutin correctly stressed Moscow’s lack of lateral connecting webs and its dependence on the Petersburg Academy of Arts for sponsors, supplies, medals, admissions, and pedagogical methods. Dmitrieva, a pioneer historian of the Moscow School, honestly conceded the shortage of talented art students in the early years, but she did not exaggerate when she called it the cradle of realism and national art. Aside from Savrasov, Perov, and Shishkin, others who studied or taught there included such luminaries in Russian art of the later nineteenth century as Konstantin Savitsky (b. 1844), Vasily Polenov (b. 1844), Isaac Levitan (b. 1860), Konstantin Korovin (b. 1861), Valentin Serov (b. 1865), and Mikhail Nesterov (b. 1862). From 1865 to 1918, the Moscow School enjoyed an independent status with the right to award major and minor silver medals and to produce classed and unclassed graduates. In 1918, it was closed and its faculty flowed partly into the Soviet institutions, Vkhutemas and the Surikov Institute.²⁷

As to public outreach, student art was exhibited irregularly along with the work of other Moscow artists. The shows began in 1839 and continued usually at two- or three-year intervals (but annually from 1849 to 1852). The tenth, in 1858, was the most successful up to that time in the quality of works, public attention, and profit—some 301 pieces done by pupils, faculty, alumni, and other artists. In the following year, the showing of Alexander Ivanov’s Christ Appearing to the People became a major cultural event. The Moscow petty trader Pavel Medvedev, who with his friends frequented the art classes, noted that the pictures included some brought from St. Petersburg. The Moscow School was, for the vast majority of Muscovites, the only window to Russian painting. The only other public venue was Moscow University where, starting in 1860, a new organization called the Society of Art Lovers showed mostly foreign works. In addition to the income from exhibit sales and lotteries, students received commissions. Among the purchasers, mostly gentry and merchants, were the future giants of merchant patronage, Tretyakov and Kozma Soldatenkov.²⁸

Was there a counter-academy? Yes and no. S. Frederick Starr has correctly stressed the links, formal and otherwise, of the provincial art schools to the Academy of Arts. Venetsianov, Stupin, and his imitators in Saransk, Penza, and Kozlov all had close ties to the Academy. The Moscow School was more independent after 1843 but shared the Academy’s general program. Starr correctly counters pious Soviet efforts to find budding realism and nationalism everywhere except at the Academy. Yet autonomous developments were inevitable at such distances from the guiding center. As Starr himself has shown definitively in his book on provincial administration, nominal chains of command or affiliations did not always translate into real power and influence at the local level. The schools’ contacts with the masters in Petersburg were irregular. The surroundings and associations of local life—whether in Moscow or on a Tver estate—allowed a degree of drift from the hierarchical academic emphasis on history, portrait, and manorial landscape, and sometimes local versions of even these. Venetsianov trained his students at Safonkovo only in genre, never in historical painting. The thorough and balanced study of art education by Moleva and Belyutin, while granting that the template sent out from the Academy was accepted, shows convincingly that local conditions generated adaptation. The environment of the small country town and buyers’ tastes conditioned new subject matter which in turn required different solutions in composition, light, and color. While new genre techniques had indeed first arisen in St. Petersburg, they remained marginal there whereas in the other towns they became more common.²⁹

The modest proliferation of art schools somewhat modified the cultural space of the provinces. Though it is probably not true that outside Petersburg and Moscow no public gallery existed in the provinces until Aivazovsky opened one in Feodosia in the Crimea in 1880,³⁰ provincial showing remained weak until the advent of the Itinerants. Yet provincial schools in a limited way generated news and knowledge about art and sent artists out into the world. Their students interacted constantly with icon painters and did commissions for churches. Arzamas artists took their wares for public display to the largest fair in Russia, at Nizhny Novgorod. When audiences came to see the school’s theater performances they saw art on the walls as well. Art schools beyond the capital helped open up space for viewing art and fueled new kinds of artistic expression. And the Moscow school became a major nursery for the painters of the coming generation.

Serf as Artist

Though an accurate count of serf artists at work in Russia in the last century of serfdom cannot be given, they far outnumbered serf musicians and actors. Thousands of serfs functioned as architects, decorators, craftsmen, technicians, builders, and engineers. Of serf painters, only a minority got on record: the very talented who worked in the fanciest palaces and estates, Academy graduates, and those who suffered a particularly cruel fate or who won their way to freedom—experiences that were not mutually exclusive. The rest left few traces. Innumerable amateur artists recruited from house and field serfs with little or no training painted for their masters, and—like actors and musicians—alternated artistic work with servants’ duties. Some specialized in artisanry and folk art. Some of the clever daubers resembled amateur masters. The talented self-taught serf sketcher Beshentsev worked as a buffet waiter for the Buturlins. As cultivated and considerate masters, they never used corporal punishment or verbal abuse and remembered Beshentsev fondly for his family sketches and mocking cartoons of the mediocre art tutor whom the Buturlins had hired from the Academy.³¹

Unlike most of the grooms and maids who played on stage or in the pit with a minimum of tutoring, serf painters, to be worth something, needed serious training. Ephemeral performance blunders could be forgiven, forgotten, or punished. Flawed paintings left a permanent record. The capital and provincial art schools trained only a minute number of serf painters, many of whom returned to their masters. The poorest nobles would simply take a boy of whatever talent into the house and put him to work. For the more affluent, a common method was to apprentice the would-be serf artist to a local icon painter for a crash course in basic compositional skills. Art lessons for the gentry and their children were very popular, and their tutors were sometimes put to train serfs.³² Many serf painters were “discovered” by their owners as icon painters. Grigory Ostrovsky, a serf of the late eighteenth century, carried his icon training over into domestic portraits.³³ Prince Nikolai Yusupov’s training center at Arkhangelskoe taught decorative arts and painting from 1818 to 1831, using free and serf teachers and pupils. The steward would contract some of them out on obrok to other landowners, or to the estate’s porcelain works. His reports complain about drunkenness, theft, and disorder among serf artists. After Yusupov’s death in 1831, the school closed and the pupils dispersed to various estates or were put out on obrok.³⁴ A few serf artists achieved fame in the eighteenth century. Ivan Argunov (1727-97), one of several artists in his family, did portraits for his master, P. B. Sheremetev, who freed him. Argunov, like many other serf painters, was often deflected by other duties, in his case as majordomo. His An Unknown Peasant Woman (1784), the first of its kind, probably had as its subject a wet-nurse from the common people—and not an actress posing for a formal portrait as once believed. Mikhail Shibanov, a serf of Prince Potëmkin (freed by 1783; died after 1789), worked for patrons all over Russia and was an early practitioner of the peasant genre. N. P. Rumyantsev granted freedom to Vasily Sazonov, later an Academician, “in homage to his talent.” Most owners viewed serf painters as mere artisans but none the less held them to be more valuable than performers or musicians. The talented serf artist, even if still in bondage, could achieve renown. Owners obtained art free of charge and some collected obrok from a serf’s own private commissions. In the 1840s, Baron Haxthausen met three serf artists in Arzamas—a father and two sons, one of whom had studied at the Academy of Arts. They paid 350 rubles a year obrok to their master so they could paint commercially and earned as much as 25 rubles for one picture. When a painter became famous, some serf owners charged high redemption fees for his liberation.³⁵

Serfs who attained some technical skill with the brush were generally set to copying, making family portraits, or decorating interiors. Most of the two hundred pictures on one of the Obolensky estates in Tula Province were copies of masters. The skillful copyist Grigory Ozerov, with wife and daughter, was purchased for two thousand rubles. Owners cherished family portraits, even if executed by self-trained serf artists. The four hundred-odd half-portraits found on the Nadezhdino estate of the Kurakins, many done by serfs, ran the gamut from exceptional to mediocre. Amateur portraitists usually painted hands poorly and made the heads of their subjects too big. N. B. Yusupov at Arkhangelskoe hung on his walls engravings done by the pupils at his drawing school. The classical rage fed the desire for mythological ceilings, friezes, pilasters, gold inlay, and murals. Peasants or servants posed as models: in one case, a coachman sat for the figure of Paris and a dairymaid for Fair Helen. Adventurous lords had their serfs create imaginative wall art, depicting in primary colors palm trees, wild beasts, and figures of Chinese and Americans. For panoramas, the landowner would assemble prints and pictures and have his serf artist copy them onto a mural. Much of the surviving anonymous wall art, some of it possessing a lubok character, was done by serf artists. At some places, serf girls were put to work weaving carpets and tapestries depicting the owner’s manorial park with ladies and gentlemen strolling around it. The master at the Zobnino estate near Tver in the late eighteenth century had his serf do a painting of the manor house, but since he did not do it from direct observation, the elevation was distorted.³⁶

Serf painters did not escape corporal punishment. A priest told of a landowner who had one of his serfs whipped to a bloody pulp for going to the village without permission, and then sicked his dog on him, whose bites proved fatal. Yet the suffering of artists seems to have stemmed more from psychological than physical abuse. Failure to get freedom was the bane of talented serf artists. In the 1830s a serf painter who belonged to one of the Orlovs had to leave the Academy of Arts when his master brought him home to paint iconostases and copy masters. He was freed only in old age. The historian Semevsky told of a painter who lived in virtual freedom until the death of his owner, at which point the artist was sold and his status was reversed by the new master. “Cases of suicide were a very common thing,” wrote Letkova, “and the chronicles of serfdom are full of them.” Yet she mentions only a few, including one who drowned himself in the master’s pond because the recalcitrant owner made him paint floors and roofs and herd swine.³⁷ A painter named Polyakov or Palyakov (no surname given; not A. V. Polyakov) learned art from the father of Academician E. Ya. Vasilev, began to move in educated circles, and did portraits in St. Petersburg society at four hundred rubles each. Polyakov’s owner encouraged the belief that he would free the painter and then reneged. He recalled Polyakov, and made him a liveried footman on his carriage as they drove to gentry homes where the serf’s art was hanging and where he had been received as a talented artist. Polyakov took to drink and disappeared.³⁸

For art historians, Vasily Tropinin (1776-1857) heads the list of notable serf artists in the way that Shchepkin does among serf actors for theater scholars (fig. 57). His protracted struggle for freedom generated lachrymose studies. A 1956 Soviet children’s book on his life, Serf Artist, typified the approach by heroizing and simplifying the subject and inventing conversations and scenes.³⁹ Tropinin, born a serf of Count A. S. Minikh in Novgorod Province, was given as part of a dowry to Count I. I. Morkov. Tropinin’s father won freedom for his work as a steward, but the boy remained enserfed. The father, noting his son’s talent, tried to have his owner send him to study in St. Petersburg. Morkov instead sent Tropinin as an apprentice pastry cook in the home of Count Zavadovsky in St. Petersburg. The young serf constantly neglected his kitchen duties in order to observe a hired professional artist at work. He began to draw for himself and was finally allowed to attend the Academy as an auditor from 1798 to 1804. Tropinin’s teachers tried to secure his freedom, but the stubborn Morkov had him sent back to one of his estates in Podolia Province to paint walls and carriage wheels as well as family portraits. Tropinin was too good a teacher and portraitist for Morkov to give him up.⁴⁰

On one occasion, a story goes, when the count took a visiting French scholar to watch Tropinin at the easel, the guest was loud in his praises. That evening at dinner, seeing Tropinin in livery among the serving lackeys, the Frenchman brought up a chair and invited the artist-waiter to sit down at table. Both master and servant registered astonishment at this gesture. The oft-told episode, recounted by a contemporary of Tropinin and probably originating with the artist himself, resonates like a fairytale about the discovery of secret nobility or imprisoned virtue, with its innocent victim, heartless jailer, and benevolent unmasker. Though the tale may have been embellished in the telling, there is no reason to doubt its substance. Discovery and deliverance form the core of all the stories about how well-disposed and highly placed people secured freedom for talented serfs. And the deliverance actually came for Tropinin, though later in his life. In 1821, the Morkovs moved to Moscow and Tropinin with them. The campaign to free him launched by Apollon Maikov, Pavel Svinin, P. N. Dmitriev, and others became a hot topic at the English Club. Morkov finally consented and on Easter Sunday 1823, at age forty-seven, Tropinin received three kisses, a colored egg, and his warrant of freedom. Tropinin was elected to the Academy for his celebrated canvas, The Lacemaker. He gained fame as a highly paid portraitist: in his lifetime, Tropinin painted about three thousand portraits including those of Pushkin, Karamzin, Gogol, and Bryullov.⁴¹

The best-known of the unfreed serf painters, Grigory Soroka (real name: Vasilev; 1823-64), was born of serf parents on the estate of P. I. Milyukov in the Vyshny Volochok district of Tver Province. Around 1838 the boy become the property of the oldest son, N. P. Milyukov, whose home stood near Lake Moldino, a body of water that Soroka painted many times. Around 1841 Soroka met Milyukov’s neighbor Venetsianov and studied on and off at the latter’s school while working as a house serf, gardener, and actor for Milyukov. Soroka was not permitted to go with Venetsianov to St. Petersburg. At the Milyukov home during the 1840s and 1850s, he painted the study with its Napoleon statuette, skull, book, and candles. Soroka portrayed his master’s father hunched over with downcast eyes and an unhappy visage and, more sympathetically, the master’s little daughters. Soroka’s self-portrait, though hardly a swagger, seems to project the serf artist into a different world: he is clean shaven, bright of face, and dressed in gentry-style white neckband, cravat, and high side collar covered by a frock coat.⁴² Although serf owners expected certain male servants to be beardless and dress somewhat in a European manner inside the house (and sometimes in livery), Soroka’s self-image seems to suggest not that of a house serf who happened to be a painter, but of an independent artist.⁴³ The natural pride embodied in the picture became the source of Soroka’s special pain when confronted with arbitrary seigniorial power.

Soroka, an original painter, could never exhibit his work. Serfdom defined his anonymity for a long time, and his paintings were resurrected in Soviet times. The later notoriety derived partly from his fate. In 1818, a few years before Soroka was born, the elder Milyukov, who had driven his peasants to work a six-day week on his demesne and freely used the lash and forced army service, had been beset with peasant disorders.⁴⁴ The son apparently brooked no impudence or pretensions from peasants or house serfs. A spat with Soroka in 1842 led Milyukov to convert the painter to a gardener for a spell. Bad blood led Milyukov to deny Soroka freedom even though he did set free a less-talented serf painter who went to the Academy in 1857. Venetsianov, who had helped free Shevchenko in 1838 and was on good terms with Milyukov, intervened. In letters he stressed Soroka’s virtues and his rapid progress in painting. But the master denied every request. Venetsianov accused him of raising up the serf painter to the delights of art, which was worse than keeping him in the dark.⁴⁵ Unfortunately, Venetsianov died in a freak sleigh accident in 1847 and Soroka lost his protector. In 1852 Soroka married a servant girl and in 1860 moved into his own home, thus removed from domestic service but still a serf. After emancipation, Soroka lodged a complaint against the former master, was sentenced to be whipped, and hanged himself in 1864. The unhappy painter acquired so much hagiographical reverence in later times that a pre-revolutionary silent film was made on his life.⁴⁶

Milyukov, like his counterparts who kept their musicians and actors in bondage, was not atypical, but not all serf artists failed in their quest for freedom. Aside from the cases of those few who fled, the commonest path was simple manumission by a sympathetic owner or by redemption. Sheremetev freed N. I. and Ya. I. Argunov and the former became an Academician. The renowned Vasily Sadovnikov (1800-1879), a serf of Princess N. P. Golitsyna (the model for Pushkin’s countess in Queen of Spades), was possibly born on her Kaluga estate but grew up in St. Petersburg. After the princess died, he was freed in 1838 by her son, D. V. Golitsyn, the Moscow art patron. Sadovnikov’s training remains a mystery but he was named Perspective Artist by the Academy after his freedom, though he achieved Academician status only in 1852 in spite of the fame he acquired from his views of St. Petersburg.⁴⁷

The state, which purchased actors and musicians in wholesale lots, did not do so for painters. Artists belonging to reluctant masters had to get their freedom through personal struggle, often with the help of private patrons. However, the Academy of Arts and the Society for the Encouragement of Artists lent their weight to the emancipation process by lobbying, politely requesting, and sometimes pressuring stubborn serf owners. The Academy artist as champion of freedom became a familiar enough figure in Russian life that it entered fiction in A. V. Timofeev’s overwrought novel The Artist (1834) about a retired provincial Academician who redeems a serf painter with his last ruble and sends him to St. Petersburg. The process generated a loose structure of “public opinion” or collective moral judgment of peers. Dmitry Malyarenko, a serf of the widow of General Musin-Pushkin from Ekaterinoslav Province, in the late 1830s and 1840s revealed his skills while copying at the Hermitage. Academy vice president Tolstoy got the Duke of Leuchtenberg to ask for Malyarenko’s freedom from the heirs of Musina-Pushkina. His letter of 1845 appealed to their kindness and to the contribution they would make to the arts of Russia. While waiting for a reply, Malyarenko informally attended the Academy and even exhibited his work there. The signature of the august in-law of the tsar carried sufficient weight and the request was granted in 1848.⁴⁸ The solution was rarely so neat. When the Academy collected three thousand rubles from well-wishers to redeem another serf artist, the owner raised the price to five thousand. Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna intervened with a royal request and the landowner relented. But when the serf artist delivered her letter, his master ordered him given twenty-five lashes for his uppity behavior. In another case, the Academy asked landowner Captain Bryanchaninov of Yaroslav Province to release a serf who was studying at the Academy. After a long delay, the captain, pleading poverty and a heavy mortgage, requested a reimbursement of twenty-five hundred rubles. The outcome of the case is unknown. For these and other reasons, the Academy remained circumspect, reluctant as it was to cause a stir in remote provinces over the rights of serf owners and to arouse the wrath of recalcitrant lords, especially since a request to free a serf could backfire.⁴⁹

A few Moscow serf pupils benefited from Academy intervention, both the two known cases resulting from the personal interest of Karl Bryullov. While visiting the Moscow Art Class, Bryullov arranged to free I. I. Lipin, a serf belonging to the Zubovs, and the event was enacted officially at a banquet. Bryullov dubbed him “my little son,” and took him to the Academy as an external student where he won a silver medal. Kirill Gorbunov (1822-93), a serf of the landowner Vladykina, met Vissarion Belinsky who hailed from the same region and took Gorbunov under his wing. In 1836 Gorbunov entered the Moscow Art Class. His freedom resulted in 1841 from letters written by Bryullov and Zhukovsky to Vladykina. After graduation from the St. Petersburg Academy, Gorbunov worked as a portraitist, later well known for his studies of Herzen, Gogol, Granovsky, and Belinsky.⁵⁰

The more active and influential Society for the Encouragement of Artists (originally “of Art”) had no analogue in the social history of music or theater. Originally a private organization, it was born in 1821, a few years after the official ban on serf students at the Academy of Arts. Its purpose was to support artists from all classes, including serfs, who had no other patronage. The founders met on November 30, 1821, in the lavish Petersburg home of Senator I. A. Gagarin on the corner of the Moika River and the Winter Canal. Gagarin, who had married the great tragedienne Ekaterina Semënova, herself of serf origin, created an exalted atmosphere by alluding to his wife’s career. As she rose to leave when the men arrived, her husband intoned the words: “the servant of Melpomene will illuminate with her light the first gathering of those who seek to serve the god Apollo.”⁵¹ Founders included the first president, brigadier general, state secretary, and imperial aide-de-camp P. A. Kikin (1775-1834); Colonel F. F. Schubert; Lieutenant Colonel A. I. Dmitrev-Mamonov, a noted battle artist of the Napoleonic wars; and Captain A. I. Kiel (Kil)—all Freemasons except Kikin. The Society set dues at two hundred rubles per year or two thousand for life. In a few years, it began receiving government subsidies and in 183 3 was renamed the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of Artists. Membership grew steadily to 160 by 1845; it came to include Academy officials such as F. P. Tolstoy; the writers Venevitinov, Gogol, Zhukovsky, and Odoevsky; and art lovers M. S. Vorontsov, A. G. Kushelëv-Bezborodko, D. N. Sheremetev, and V. A. Perovsky.

The society’s organizers—courtiers, magnates, and patrons of culture like the founders of the Philharmonia two decades earlier—bore the progressive spirit and sentimental patriotism lingering from the 1812 war. Early membership included veterans of the proto-Decembrist benevolent unions, Freemasons, Bible Society members, mystics, enlighteners, and philanthropists whose causes were at flood tide before the crackdown of the mid-1820s and the failed Decembrist revolt. They brought a missionary tone to the society’s discourse on artists, and they played on the romantic trope, then fashionable in European literature, of the poor and youthful artist embattled against adversity. The founders stated baldly that neither the state nor the Academy could bridge the gulf between talented artists and the public. This “had to be done in the public [sphere].” Since, as they put it, “the channel between [the public] and artists does not exist,” the society would have to create it.⁵² The language bordered on subversive in an ascriptive society like Russia’s. To some it seemed as though this organization was impinging on the business of the state as arbiter of taste and controller of the art world. No wonder that the conservative Academy professor A. I. Sauerweid (Zauerveid), a man close to court circles, complained that “the Society for the Encouragement of Artists is in opposition to the Academy of Arts”; he denounced its members as “False Dmitrys who wish to undermine the Academy and make themselves powerful.”⁵³

In fact, although clashes occasionally arose, cooperation with the Academy prevailed. The society donated equipment to the Academy in return for special privileges for its subsidized protégés. It supported eight artists who went to Rome in the 1830s and 1840s. Its most famous pensioner, Karl Bryullov, broke with the society in 1829 due to a delay in getting his money. The society endowed gold medal prizes, set up special life classes inside the Academy for its own artists, and organized the release of townsmen’s class obligations in order to gain them admission. It wheedled the Academy to bend its rules over and over again to accommodate pupils who were otherwise ineligible. It ran the Petersburg School of Drawing which had been founded in 1839 on Vasilevsky Island by Finance Minister Egor Kankrin to train the lower classes as draftsmen for industry and to train poor youths as artists. When a successor tried to withhold the school’s funding, the society took it over and expanded it to one thousand pupils. Ivan Kramskoi taught and Ilya Repin studied there.⁵⁴ A prominent society member, Colonel Alexei Tomilov (1779-1848), on returning wounded from the 1812 war to become an art collector and patron of young artists, invited them to the private collections in his home, and maintained a guest center for artists at his estate near Staraya Ladoga on the Volkhov River where they worked even after Tomilov’s death.⁵⁵

From the start, the society, on its own and in cooperation with the Academy, engaged in freeing serf artists. Its motivation sprang from charitable and humanitarian impulses rather than from legalistic notions about civil rights. Yet it went beyond philanthropy and patronage in helping any talented artist—not only favorites of patrons. Since all transactions of the society were based on the permission of the owner, the process was completely legal. All manumissions had to be approved by the Senate. The state kept a watchful eye on the society’s activities. Count Benckendorf, chief of the political police or Third Section, in checking that freed artists were really talented, inquired about them from the serfs’ owners, the local governor, or both. Most landowners approached by the society agreed to manumission. According to sketchy data, the society helped to liberate the following artists: Pantaleimon Stepanov, a state peasant from Pskov Province, 1828; A. A. Alekseev, serf of Kuzminova, 1832; N. V. Lifanov, serf of S. V. Panina, 1834; Andrei Bezlyudny, serf of D. N. Sheremetev, 183 5; the Arzamas pupil Vasily Raev (1807-1870), freed in 1839 for five thousand rubles; I. I. Konobeevsky, serf of E. D. Naryshkin, 1840; Anton Ivanov, serf of O. Ya. Domashneva of Kostroma Province, 1841: F. Belov, serf of S. I. Mestr [de Maistre], 1846; and an otherwise unidentified Konchalevsky.⁵⁶

The case of Moisei Dikov, a serf of Poltava landowner G. Vishnevsky, produced narrative language that bore telltale signs of intelligentsia ideals of freedom and art and probably the standard mode of expression in such processes. In his letter to the society asking for assistance, Dikov wrote (or had written for him) his “story.” Noting his “strong passion for drawing,” his father had sent him to Kiev to work under an icon painter from whence after two and a half years he was brought back to the master’s home. Dikov implored the society for its assistance “to achieve ... what I cannot even live without. Granting me freedom, you will thus give me the strength to pursue the path designated for me by fate.” Dikov’s owner demanded six thousand rubles, which the society could not pay, and the painter’s fate is unknown.⁵⁷

Two serf artists whose liberation was associated with the Society for the Encouragement of Artists have left fuller traces. A. V. Polyakov (1801-3 5), a house serf of Lieutenant General Kornilov, was sent in 1825 to St. Petersburg to work under George Dawe. This English artist, commissioned by Tsar Alexander I to do portraits of the leading officers of the Napoleonic wars for the Gallery of Heroes in the Hermitage, ran a virtual portrait factory. A cheat and an exploiter, he had Polyakov and others copy his originals; he then signed them and sold them at a thousand rubles each to friends and relatives of the august subjects while paying his workers a pittance. Kornilov refused to free Polyakov. The publicist Pavel Svinin, a self-appointed champion of vulnerable artists, exposed Dawes’s fraud in the pages of his journal Notes of the Fatherland and created a scandal in which Faddei Bulgarin defended the Englishman. In 1828, the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, outraged that a foreigner was exploiting the labor of Russians, took Polyakov’s request for freedom to Tsar Nicholas who granted it—the sole case, to my knowledge, of his intervention for the freedom of a serf artist. The society got Polyakov admitted to the Academy as a pensioner some time before 183 3 when he was named a Free Artist.⁵⁸

The most famous serf artist of the Russian Empire, Ukrainian painter and musician Taras Shevchenko (1814-61), though renowned in the world for his poetry, won his freedom through art. Shevchenko experienced almost daily the sting of humiliation as a serf for half his life, and as a convict and private soldier in his final years. Born in Kiev Province on the estate of the lordly Senator Vasily Engelhardt, Shevchenko was orphaned at age eleven and worked variously as a swineherd and a kitchen boy where he was beaten by the chef. On the death of old Engelhardt in 1828, Taras became the personal servant of the son, Pavel (1798-1849), a civil servant known for misusing his serfs. When not filling the master’s pipe and cleaning his boots, Taras surreptitiously copied the art that hung on the walls. Accompanying the master to his military posts, he got his first art lessons in Vilna and Warsaw. Engelhardt sent Shevchenko to Petersburg in 1831 to study art. Pavel’s brother, Vasily, owner of Engelhardt House, apprenticed the young man to an ex-serf guildmaster of painters and decorators, V. G. Shiryaev, a graduate of the Arzamas Academy. Shiryaev had learned no moral lesson on the road from bondage to freedom except brutality toward his workers. Lacking sympathy for his underling’s aspirations, Shiryaev assigned Shevchenko to decorating work at Petersburg’s three theaters.⁵⁹

In his spare time, Shevchenko read, looked at pictures, and copied statues in the Summer Garden (though serfs were not permitted there). He was befriended by fellow Ukrainians Evgeny Grebenko (Evhen Hrebenka), composer of the noted romance Dark Eyes; and Academy professor Vasily Grigorovich (Hrihorovych), who was also secretary of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists. In 1835 they got him into society-sponsored classes and the Hermitage. Serfs were in no position to return slights from their owners, but Shevchenko managed to get at least a bit of revenge on a nobleman who was not his owner. P. D. Seletsky, who once tried to collaborate with Shevchenko on an opera, tells an otherwise undocumented story about Shevchenko in his days as a budding artist before he got his freedom. A general commissioned a portrait of himself by Shevchenko for a fee of a hundred rubles; on seeing the finished work, he would pay only fifty. Shevchenko kept the picture, repainted it on a barber’s sign, and hung it up in full view. Before the furious general could manage to purchase the serf artist in order to wreak vengeance on him, Shevchenko won his freedom.⁶⁰ True or not, the anecdote certainly reflects one aspect of the artist’s rebellious character.

The “discovery story” or “freedom narrative” of Shevchenko comes in several versions. In one, an Academy student became his friend and protector. In another, he met his savior while sketching in the Summer Garden, a tale that Shevchenko may have borrowed from another artist’s actual experience. In any case, the boy made the acquaintance of Venetsianov, Zhukovsky, Bryullov, and Mikhail Vielgorsky who, impressed by him, determined to win his freedom. One by one, supporters approached Pavel Engelhardt. Bryullov, though at the peak of his fame and influence, got a refusal to release the “indispensable worker.” After his visit, Bryullov called Engelhardt “a swine in slippers.” Venetsianov spoke to Engelhardt as one landowner to another and then discoursed on philanthropy and enlightenment. Engelhardt interrupted him in order to get to the price: of twenty-five hundred rubles. The desperate Shevchenko was close to suicide at one point. But the money materialized when Zhukovsky and Vielgorsky organized a lottery in which Bryullov’s portrait of Zhukovsky was sold and the proceeds were used to free Shevchenko in 1838. The twenty-four-year-old ex-serf shouted “freedom, freedom!” and kissed the attesting document signed by Bryullov, Zhukovsky, and Vielgorsky. On the following day, Shevchenko enrolled in the Academy of Arts.⁶¹

After graduation, Shevchenko returned to his homeland where he produced literary masterpieces, engaged in radical nationalist politics in the Cyril and Methodius Society, and was arrested and sent as a soldier to the frontier region of Orenburg. In this new serfdom, which lasted from 1847 to 1857, the poet-artist was forbidden to write or draw. When the tsar denied Shevchenko’s appeal to revise this ban, the artist in him suffered more than the writer. In time Shevchenko defied the ruling and even secretly sold some of his pictures through friends. Beyond Orenburg lay the broad Asian steppe and the shores of the Aral Sea. While posted to these regions, Shevchenko encountered Kalmyks, Tatars, Bashkirs, and Kirghiz. A decade earlier, these peoples had attracted the artist V. I. Sternberg (Shternberg) who had set out as a volunteer to Khiva with the ill-fated Perovsky expedition in 1839. Sternberg produced in that year a set of lithographs, Peoples of the Orenburg Region, and an oil painting, Kalmyk Yurts. These works, displaying painterly conventions in composition, coloring, shadow, and foliage, were among the earliest Russian graphic representations of the natives of this region. Shevchenko went beyond Sternberg in both content and style. His watercolors of what looks like a desert fire and of scenes on the bleak Aral Sea are original and disturbing. On an expedition into the steppe and the Karakum desert, Shevchenko sketched headless corpses of fallen warriors decades before Vasily Vereshchagin (b. 1842) built his fame on this kind of material.⁶²

A few observations may be made about Russian serf painters, freed or otherwise. They worked in every form, not only genre and landscape which came to be associated with native “Russian” art; but in portraiture and, in a few cases, even history painting. Except for Tropinin and, to a lesser extent, Soroka, few produced masterpieces. Shevchenko’s poetry by far outstripped in quality his graphics, charming as they may be. Yet serf artists as a whole not only enriched the everyday visual world of Russian homes but provided the painters themselves with an expressive outlet unavailable to the bulk of the population. The efforts of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, limited as they were, brought freedom to some artists and undreamed-of career success to a few. As the Soviet scholar Golubeva noted decades ago, the society’s contribution to the world of artists has been underrated by historians. It could never develop into a large-scale abolitionist movement. But by legally helping to free talented human beings from the chains of serfdom, it added a thread to the growing narrative of antiserfdom in literature and to the private conversations about freedom in drawing rooms of town and country. A prevailing view of art among the gentry put patronage and consumption of art at their end of the social scale and its creation or performance further down. Art was what the gentry bought or got free of charge from inferiors—including serfs; and their training of artists was strictly instrumental and personal. By institutionalizing “encouragement,” the leaders of the society asserted a collective respect for art, and, by implication, for the artist. This constituted a further step along the way to a new social imagery of the art world from an ascriptive hierarchy to an open ladder on which people of talent could climb the heights of art made by themselves.

Peasants on Canvas

Paralleling the social activists who worked to free serfs from bondage came painters who sought in their canvases to free serfs and other rural denizens from anonymity or invisibility. For such painters this meant leaving the studio at least for a time. Artists engaged in outdoor art had traditionally used crayon and pen on location and then finished their works in a studio. This handy device lacked the direct confrontation of painter with the changing colors and light of nature. European plein air artists in oil or watercolor appeared in the seventeenth century and came into their own in the eighteenth. In Paris, the influential Pierre-Henri Valencienne exalted landscape as the equal of any style or genre, though only if done in plein air in a quest for “reality.” He allowed for a distinction between the intellectual “historical” landscape and the emotional “rural” (contemporary) landscape. British artists “went to the countryside” also. Watercolor and sketching societies in the early nineteenth century made rural excursions to study natural detail and to depict the occupations and dress of its inhabitants in “natural” rather than “pastoral” physiognomy. It had become absurd, said one painter, to picture ''a race of gods and goddesses, with scythes and hayrakes."⁶³

Academic artists everywhere had to rethink certain key components of pictures when they embarked for the countryside. The Roman steed became a draft horse, the chariot a cart, the temple a village church, the grand plaza a market square, and the balletic and declaiming characters of Hellenic myth—ordinary people. Work habits changed as well. Traditional European painters often executed a landscape wholly from memory or imagination within a studio or in a mix of plein air sketches pieced together indoors. Painters also needed to learn new techniques to capture gestures, poses, muscles, body rhythms, strain, energy, and sweat, not to mention real people, crops, barns, land forms, and dirt—as opposed to studio models, sculptural figuration, backdrops, and props.⁶⁴

The move to “observed landscape” in Russia came slowly.⁶⁵ Its artists faced a number of obstacles in turning to the land for inspiration. A strong impetus for British landscape painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the intrusion of industrialization, which seemed to threaten nature and thus to render it more precious. No such threat loomed on the Russian horizon in these decades. The alleged lack of picturesqueness in the Russian outdoors noted by Karamzin still held sway in academic opinion and foreign commentary. The Marquis de Custine spoke of the landscape around St. Petersburg as “a soggy moorland, low-lying and scattered as far as the eye can see, with birch trees which appear scanty and meagre.”⁶⁶ The Academy of Arts held the Russian land unworthy of serious representation. Silvestr Shchedrin was among the first Russian painters, in the 1820s, to go outdoors. But, though he executed masterly studies of the Italian countryside, his work paled when he applied his brush to Russian scenery. Some academic artists were unable to break with pastoral traditions. V. G. Khudyakov (1826-76), who had studied in Moscow, Petersburg, and Rome, as late as 1849 painted a Shepherd and Peasant Girl, (GRMFZh, 3545), complete with a stylized leering male who, though attired in Russian costume, held a panpipe, wore a wreath, and was shod in goatlike footware.⁶⁷ Then, of course, Russian distances and poor travel facilities and amenities discouraged traversing the deep interior. Those who began to work exclusively out of doors had to have physical stamina and to face the elements. It is not hard to see why an unknown Russian landscape painter on the outskirts of Moscow at midcentury painted himself at work, set up as comfortably as possible with easel, palette, chair, and umbrella.⁶⁸

Russian artistic explorers, varying enormously in professional competence, shared an outlook sharply different from the painters of estate grounds. Indeed the fashion of big panoramic manor house canvases was fading, reflecting the decline both of the manorial economy and of the inclination to display one’s manicured acres. The picturesque or occluded landscape came into play in painting and in fiction. Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter (1848-52), for example, contains only one or two descriptions of panoramic views.⁶⁹ The bulk of the outdoor scenes are bathed in more intimate nature. Early Russian realists, long neglected and marginalized as primitive, provincial, and subcanonical, were later and are now recognized as being more than makers of “quasi-art.” In addition to the pupils and disciples of Venetsianov—Slavyansky, Nikifor Krylov, Soroka, Krendovsky, Zelentsov—many of the outdoor realists were lesser known and unidentified artists from Novgorod, Pskov, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Smolensk, Tver, Saratov, Nizhny, Tula, and other places. Their combination of European technique with native styles produced a body of work that was on the whole bright, charming, and direct. In spite of some stiffness, they lack aristocratic disdain, aloofness, and distance; and they are marked by affect, emotion, and openness. Color predominates over correct linear perspective, and landscapes lack the Arcadian tranquility of convention.⁷⁰

Maxim Vorobev, a favorite of Nicholas I, an Academy man to the core and a veteran of the Roman pensionate, seemed to stand for all that later critics would complain about. Yet he exerted a great influence on the new landscape painters who moved outdoors. Some of his pupils ventured into the immense steppe, elongated by the unrelieved emptiness of a road, as in Alexei Savrasov’s Steppe in Daytime (1852) and V. I. Sternberg’s Mill on the Steppe (1838).⁷¹ Others braved the frost. Nikifor Krylov (1802-31) executed his Winterscape (1827) at the Tosno River about twenty-five or thirty kilometers from St. Petersburg where the painter spent a month boarding with a rich fuel merchant patron. The landscape shows the river, a stand of evergreen trees dividing the whiteness of sky from that of the snowy earth, and frozen water beyond to add depth. Though conventional in composition, Krylov’s canvas has abandoned Arcadia in favor of a bleak Russian winter.⁷²

Undeterred by distance, two other Russian painters, the brothers Grigory and Nikanor Chernetsov, Academicians both, roamed Russia and the Caucasus in the 1830s. By decade’s end, they were ready to carry out their dream of traversing the entire course of the Volga River and capturing it and the adjoining landscape in art. They sought and won the support of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, and official permission from the Ministry of the Court via the Academy. In May 1838, the Chernetsov brothers, accompanied by serf artist Anton Ivanov (1818 or 1811-1865), set out on their voyage. In a specially designed floating studio, they sailed down the great river from Rybinsk to Kostroma, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, and almost to Astrakhan, facing sudden storms and ice floes on the way. During the voyage, the brothers, each doing opposite river banks, produced hundreds of sketches, prints, and paintings as well as a panoramic canvas of the entire voyage, later exhibited in Petersburg by unrolling it through two windows in a way that suggested the movement and noise of a ship. Selected works from the trip later shown at the Academy created a flurry of interest among the Petersburg public; and their success enabled the brothers, through the society, to gain freedom for their serf artist traveling companion Ivanov, who depicted the voyage in his painting The Brothers Chernetsov on the Boat on the Volga. The Chernetsovs produced no impressive landscapes on their journey. Rather they captured towns, skylines, historical and archeological sites; picturesque vignettes of river banks, waterways, and vessels of every sort; and people at work. By treating in their notes and pictures the Volga in all its drabness as well as in its glorious variety as a national icon, these Russian artists were seeking the “prospects for a nation” in a way rarely attempted in the polished studies promoted by academic art.⁷³

Charting the limitations of some of these early practitioners, Christopher Ely, in his study of the evolving imagery of Russian nature, notes that “new aesthetic approaches to the depiction of Russian landscape scarcely registered until the 1850s.”⁷⁴ This is true in regard to the rendering of physical land forms and the overall reading and construction of a “Russian nature” in art. The novelty came in works of provincial genre, often including or overlapping with landscape, representing people—indoors and outdoors—who came alive on canvas in new ways: peasants, workers, merchants, townspeople, and nobles.

How were peasants represented in art? Painters had a wide choice of treatment: grotesque and vulgar, nearly invisible as staffage, poor and miserable, wracked by physical labor, joyous, or possessed of noble dignity. The choices were conditioned by the conventions of one’s era, the accessibility of real peasants, personal attitudes, or a reigning ideology—among other things. The grotesque peasants sometimes found in medieval and early modern European art, with their short, fat bodies and vulgar gestures, became rare by the eighteenth century when peasants were mostly reduced to staffage. Eventually, they graduated into close-up treatment; in Linda Nochlin’s words, from ''picturesque background figures" to the foreground, with attendant visual, social, and psychological implications in images devoid either of the “patronizingly picturesque charm” of previous imagery or of “elevated, transcendental rhetoric.” This was a gradual and irregular process. Early nineteenth-century European artists studying in Rome tended to “nationalize” their Italian models; by the 1840s, they had turned to their “own” peasants to paint. The peasant genre spread throughout Europe in the wake of the ethnographic romanticism that flowered between 1806, when Clemens Brentano coined the term Volkskunde, and 1846 when W. J. Thoms invented the word “folklore.” In the same era, European literature made its own discovery, combined with idealization, of a real and sympathetic peasantry. Alessandro Manzoni drew criticism for making peasants the protagonists of I promessi sposi. (1825-27). The vogue was taken up by George Sand in France and by Berthold Auerbach in Germany. Peasants thus entered the problem novel—and public consciousness—alongside workers, slaves, orphans, and the generally downtrodden or neglected.⁷⁵ But what kind of visibility did painted peasants acquire? In England, paintings of the poor always fell under social and aesthetic restraints when produced for the rich. If properly rendered, they were welcome in gentry homes even though their real-life models were not. When rich and poor shared a canvas, the latter were usually painted in darker colors, thus making the chiaroscuro of landscape a metaphor of stratified society. “Negative” village types rarely appeared on canvas, and the late eighteenth-century paintings of George Morland (1763-1804) offended good taste by showing the poor in their poverty. Rural squalor and the uprootedness of country life brought on by a massive enclosure movement seldom appeared in British art.⁷⁶

Peasants, except for those in popular prints, appeared in Russian art only in the late eighteenth century. Grotesquerie, when apparent, was reserved for drunken figures at fairs or taverns, and early manorial landscapists used peasants as mere stick figures without character. But Ivan Tonkov and Mikhail Ivanov produced a few scenes of village life and peasants at work.⁷⁷ As the landscape began to fill up with more kinds of figures in the early nineteenth century, the peasantry also assumed a natural place. No Russian Morland appeared until Vasily Perov in the 1850s. Till then, almost at the end of serfdom, the rural landscape rarely showed the drudgery and never the abuse and social conflict of ''real villages."⁷⁸ As with other social representations, rural ones were bound up with the various relationships between art and power: those of production (patron, artist, model), of figurative content, and of the effect upon the spectator, real or implied. At the Academy, aesthetic conventions long discouraged coarse images of the “lower orders” from interloping into Arcadia. Peasant figures for the most part continued to be classicized, pastoralized, idealized, and romanticized. Although tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I both purchased paintings of peasants at “work” from Venetsianov, pictures depicting the harsh reality of village life could not appeal to gentry. Hung on the wall of the manor house, they would violate the myth of a cultured estate, serve as a daily reminder of peasant realities, and create political uneasiness.

Peasant life none the less crowded onto canvases continuously from the 1820s, in the form of work, leisure, domesticity, worship, revelry, and recruitment. Showing peasants engaged in actual labor proved to be a problem everywhere. In Britain, the transition from “happy husbandmen” to the “laboring poor” in art came in the late eighteenth century and it took some effort by painters and public alike to witness the “exchanging of the shepherds of Arcadia for the ploughmen of England.” The Arcadian poor still persisted, but came to be balanced by Georgic husbandry. Here, peasants rested only after work, and not in an ale house. The resultant “half-image” continued to obscure the harsher realities of rural life but seemed to project a more honest picture. In France, Jean-François Millet’s The Sower (1850), which offered viewers a glimpse of unadorned backbreaking toil, was harshly criticized by some as “provocative and socialistic.”⁷⁹

The prime painters of peasants in this era, Venetsianov and his pupils, proudly eschewed pastoralism. But most of them still idealized the peasantry and imputed a serene peasant universe which reflected a sympathetic and spiritual admiration for village people, but certainly not for the life they were constrained to lead. Though few have ever noticed it, the Venetsianov school strikingly anticipated and reflected the values of Slavophilism which also hailed the harmony of village life and the spirituality of the peasantry, while often downplaying its crudity. Venetsianov himself was the first to devote the bulk of his productive life—almost three decades—to Russian rural subjects: house serfs, shepherds, sowers, harvesters, and threshers. Richard Hare called Venetsianov’s Russia a “dream-like agricultural utopia” based on a vision of loyal peasants and benign landowners. Most of his peasant studies recall the sentimentalized peasants of Radishchev and Karamzin. In the words of Alison Hilton, Venetsianov’s “innovation lay in realizing that the classical ideal of harmony could be achieved through a new vocabulary of observation rather than imitation of antique models.” He employed academic ideals not to marginalize his subjects but to elevate them to human dignity. That dignity, it turns out, was rooted not in labor but in repose.⁸⁰

As to peasants at work, in the 1870s the Russian nationalist and social-minded critic Vladimir Stasov reminded viewers that a dusty road in a painting by Shishkin formed the route that real peasants took on their way to labor in the fields.⁸¹ Apparently commentators in the earlier period did not feel the need to fill the viewer’s mind with the “missing agriculturalist.” During this entire period, not one Russian artist represented backbreaking field work. The regnant myth of Russian pastorale in manorial practices, poetry, and art implied that “work practically did itself on Russian estates.”⁸² In Venetsianov, one hardly ever finds someone actually working. Most of his studies are static portraits or depict some cart-pushing and leading of horses. Only in Peeling Beets (1822) does Venetsianov get down to real labor in a grim indoor scene about readiness for the winter, a reminder that field work was only one aspect of the labor that peasants—especially women—had to perform through the year. Even though the actual peeling is suspended for conversation in the picture, this is probably the closest Venetsianov ever got to a realistic representation of people at work. Despite its relative harshness, Tsar Alexander I bought the painting for one thousand rubles and hung it in the Winter Palace.⁸³ Venetsianov's other peasant studies, more idealized and more appealing as art, exude a sense of the timeless rural world. Three pre-1827 canvases treat women in the field. In Harvest: Summer, a young mother with an infant on her lap dominates the foreground. The nearby sickle tells us that she will soon go back to reaping. The toil of the indistinct harvesters in the middle ground is only suggested. The comforting composition contrasts warm and dark colors with the bright sun-splashed fields. In the Hayfield combines the work-rest theme with that of the family. A peasant woman near a haystack nurses her infant and listens to her small daughter who will no doubt mind the baby when her mother picks up the rake at her feet and rejoins the farmers in the background. The repose is temporary, the nurturing takes place, and the figures seem in perfect harmony with each other and with nature. For the celebrated In the Field: Spring, Venetsianov has another young peasant mother in bare feet leading a team of horses pulling a cultivator while her baby sits nearby on the ground.⁸⁴ Instead of showing exertion, her body language closely resembles that of a Russian folk dance in the position of feet and outstretched arms. The dance had been a frequent source for figure composition since the early Renaissance.⁸⁵ A peasant viewer of the painting may have seen something else, a “live” version of a common motif in folk art: a peasant woman flanked by two horses, usually ridden by armed men.⁸⁶ The artist surely meant to indicate the naturalness of the peasant. For viewers, the treatment was bound to mask the arduous work being performed in the heat of the sun.

Venetsianov edged his way gradually into painting rural life. A piece from the early 1820s shows a dreamy little shepherd boy sprawled on the ground by a fence with a Russian dudka (pipe or fife). Is Venetsianov mocking the pastorale with a prop in the hands of an all too human peasant boy? A later picture, The Sleeping Shepherd (1824-25), clearly marks a transitional moment for Venetsianov between the mythic shepherds of his academic training and the peasant lad he sees before him. The boy is drowsing against a tree beside a stream, with a few figures and a barn or hut further on. The peasant lad Vasyutka (1820s) sits and rolls strips of bark into balls. Parania (1817-18), a very young girl, reposes beneath a tree in a forest with a basket of mushrooms. Boys and girls and women abound in Venetsianov. We never see anything like a strong, young, adult peasant male at work. There was as yet no room in this psycho-cultural space for such social imagery. Children were sexually neutral. Male artists liked to paint young women; and these were all too often available to serf owners, including Venetsianov himself who “sinned” with one of his peasant models. Venetsianov’s sleeping boys and tranquil madonnas of the fields, with children asleep or at play nearby, is another world from Taras Shevchenko’s bitter poem of the 1850s, “The Dream,” in which a mother with her baby boy naps in a field and has a golden dream of freedom and happiness for her son. She then awakes still locked in bondage and facing heavy labor.⁸⁷

Close-ups of peasants grouped in collective labor are rare in Venetsianov. In Threshing Floor (1822-23), a skillful exercise in deep focus, he painted his own peasants and barn. Two of the seven figures are “working” (one pushing, one pulling a wagon). The others, male and female, are sitting or standing, indifferent to anything that is going on and staring away from each other. Though some of them are relatives, to judge from facial features, there is no sense of family, much less of a devotion to the job at hand. Here, Venetsianov is exalting neither his peasants nor their daily burdens. Galina Leonteva’s 1980 book on Venetsianov draws a somewhat unfair comparison of The Threshing Floor and Bruni’s 1824 historical canvas, Camilla. One might as well set up a contrast between David’s Oath of the Horatii and a Courbet or Millet field scene. But her point is unassailable. Bruni offered classical figures and poses that are theatrical rather than painterly, with artificial light emanating from nowhere, perspectives converging on Horatio, and a flat staging in the foreground. Venetsianov used deep perspective, a clear and natural light source, no dramatic center, and something like real people. Even though his peasants are obviously posed, they are posing for a picture rather than acting in a play. Commenting on Tsar Nicholas I’s purchase of The Threshing Floor, Leonteva tartly remarked that the sight of happy hard-working peasants probably pleased him. Yet the picture suggests neither happiness nor hard work.⁸⁸

For all his occasional “realism,” Venetsianov almost always stops his peasants on the verge of performing a job. In The Spinner (1820s), a mature peasant woman faces us with the instrument of her labor in hand. Venetsianov virtually replicates the pose in Pelageya (no later than 1825), a young woman with a scythe—an odd thing since women normally used sickles.⁸⁹ They are all ready for but not engaged in physical action. In Venetsianov’s Morning of a Country Lady, the tasks of the two serf women are anticipated, not shown. The mistress of the manor house—modeled by the artist’s wife—looks down at a kneeling serf and points to a bundle of flax. The peasant women are wearing naturally wrinkled but clean sarafans. The kneeler looks up at the lady at an angle, accented by the rod held by her companion who looks at the viewer, her face possibly showing some trepidation. Morning is the only example in Russian painting of this era in which the serfs are face to face with their owner inside the house.⁹⁰ The only genre picture I have seen showing a servant at work inside the house was done in 1836 by P. Bezsonov, a pupil of Venetsianov. A well-dressed, good-looking young lackey is sweeping up a modestly furnished room with one of Venetsianov’s pictures on the wall (fig. 5).⁹¹ Like Venetsianov, his serf pupil Grigory Soroka treated peasants in landscape as autonomous figures. In View of a Dam (pre-1847), the manor house and park lie across the water, as in “prospect” paintings. But the foreground is populated not by the lord or his guests but by full-sized peasants, a lad and two women. In Soroka’s well-known Fishermen (1840s), we have two peasant boys in the foreground—one on shore and one in a boat. Across a broad lake lie the estate buildings, church, and village. In these and similar works by Soroka about peasants enjoying leisure near the water, the recessional progress of peasants, pond, and manor suggests a social narrative.⁹² In Priscilla Roosevelt’s words, View of a Dam“symbolizes the divide between the world of the peasant mowers and their landowner.”⁹³ The viewer knows that this is not a village scene but gentry turf where serfs are essentially servants or farmers and not residents or guests. The painting also reveals Soroka’s decision not to put his peasants to work: the boy holds a scythe and a rake lies on the ground, but he and his companions are having lunch.

Soroka also addressed one of his teacher’s themes in Threshing Floor (1842) (GRMFZh, 5180; fig. 58).⁹⁴ Soroka’s barn is bathed in darkness, with a few figures barely discernible in the rear. But the diminutive young peasant girls in the foreground tell the real story: the colorful local costumes of Venetsianov are replaced by dark and shabby garments, work coats called balakhony.⁹⁵ The figure on the left holding a bag of grain gives a faintly sad and ironic smile to the viewer; the other, lifting a basket, looks at the first with an expression hard to read. Nothing has changed from Venetsianov’s treatment of labor; hardly any is in sight. But the indifference and quiet resignation of Venetsianov seems to have given way to Soroka’s darker vision. Even if we did not have the artist’s depressing biography at hand, this and his other canvases convey a somber mood about country life that one could never find in previous works.

Venetsianov's other students and contemporaries come no closer to the depiction of the strain and sweat of labor. In the foreground of Krylov’s Winterscape mentioned above, we have stacked lumber and employees engaged in not very strenuous work. Horses and peasant men and women are pulling firewood on sleds and bearing water; those in the middleground are chatting. Lavr Plakhov’s haying cycle of 1840-45 (GRMFZh, 147-48) has a group of peasant farmers going to the field, haying, drying, and returning home. On the march to the field, peasants on foot and horseback brandish their rakes and flails like the weapons of a bogatyr about to engage in battle. P. Gruzinsky (1837-92), an Academy graduate who did battle paintings, tackled the same theme in Haying (1860). Peasants can be seen at work only in the far background. In the foreground father and son sit in a cart as the father gazes into the distance like a Byronic figure staring at Fate across the Alps (GRMFZh, 1403).⁹⁶ This (non)representation of peasant work seems to fit a code emerging elsewhere about the relationship of the natural and the social order which implied an alternation of toil and rest. In British art, the juxtaposition has been interpreted, with the support of intertextual reading, as a Virgilian celebration of the normative daily life of the rural lower classes: physical toil followed by brief spells of regenerative rest as in Thomas Gainsborough’s Wooded Landscape with Peasant Resting (c. 1747) and dozens of others like it all over Europe. But there may be a simpler explanation of all the sitting or reclining peasants. Venetsianov and his pupils often used studio models dressed in peasant costume whom they posed indoors; landscapes were painted in separately. We have direct pictorial evidence of this in A. A. Alexeev’s 1827 canvas Venetsianov's Studio, where the “peasant” girl poses among copies of ancient statuary. There was nothing dishonest or unusual about this practice. European and Russian landscapists often built up their pictures from a combination of studio work, imagination, and plein air painting. Working in Italy, the French painter Leopold Robert posed local brigands as peasants in the 1820s and 1830s. It was much easier to paint a subject in repose than to capture one in the act of toiling. Practical considerations might have been as important as aesthetic or “ideological” ones in keeping work sufficiently far into the background of Russian rural painting.⁹⁷

Things were different with handicrafts and metalworking in village smithies or industrial foundries. Plakhov’s Workshop (1830s) shows a craftsman at work at a substantial worktable with his tools—vice, hammer, awl, hatchet, saw, glue pot. A few other paintings of the period have similar themes: men and boys as masons, carpenters, sweepers, blade sharpeners. Fëdor Baikov’s At the Blacksmith’s (1844), a rough and simple picture, sets the brightly lit smithy deep in a countryside arched by a big sky (GRMFZh, 3823). Plakhov’s better-known Smithy of a year later is especially striking. Done in various shades of brown and red, it evokes the blazing heat of the workplace. Anvil, buckets, horseshoes, a vice, a sledgehammer, and other tools dominate the foreground. The bearded blacksmith with leather apron is in the act of shaping a wheel rim with his hammer as a younger man melts iron for the molds in the red-hot furnace.⁹⁸ Hard work, the laborers’ dignity, and the equipment make the painting one of the most important treatments of labor in the realistic mode. The same holds for K. S. Pavlov’s Carpenter (1838) (GRMFZh, 5258) whose brawny-armed subject is a real worker doing real work against a somber background.

Most factory workers belonged to the peasant estate, and many were serfs. Aside from Petersburg shipyard scenes, few factory paintings were set in big cities during this period, Vasily Sadovnikov’s Foundry Yard in St. Petersburg (1830s?) which I have not seen, being an early example of urban industry in art.⁹⁹ Although in 1800 Russia was the largest producer of iron in the world, plants and mills were often found in rural settings, particularly in or near the Ural Mountains, which by the end of the eighteenth century housed 176 metallurgical factories, mostly private, using serf labor. Their owners tended to spend lavishly on buildings rather than on reinvestment,¹⁰⁰ and these buildings—more often than the workers within—became the subjects of canvases commissioned by the owners.

Anatoly Demidov, the notorious profligate and art lover, resided in Florence and owned a vast metallurgical works at Chernoistochinsk in the Urals, built in 1729. In 1836, he hired the Academy graduate and provincial art teacher Pavel Vedenetsky to do a canvas of this industrial complex. Vedenetsky employed the manorial perspective: an elevated angle with the host in the foreground pointing out to his guests the vast network of factory buildings across the stream. A refreshment table and tent for the guests occupies the foreground and the workers’ settlement stretches into the distance. The palpable inequality is softened by the peasants or servants sharing the foreground. As in manorial scenes, the painting is all about ownership and not about the labor going on inside the factory buildings. Another Demidov property was captured in the 1830s by I. Khudoyarov, a Demidov serf artist. His view of the Nizhny Tagil Metal Works, built in 1725, is another vast panorama with elevated angle. The foreground is crowded with officers, nobles, and ladies on a high bluff overlooking the factory and workers’ village and a lakeside town. On display is the holiday promenading of the gentry, the men in European clothes, the women in local peasant costumes. The workers are completely invisible. The Demidov canvases, unsurprisingly, seem to have been the norm in what little there was of painting of factory complexes in the early nineteenth century.¹⁰¹

When a painter stepped inside an industrial worksite, the scene changed drastically. In The Iron Foundry (midcentury) by an unknown artist the viewer beholds the deep interior of a foundry, the red glow of the furnaces, and the allied machinery (fig. 59). The boss wears heavy merchant garb; workers are fully dressed, despite the searing heat, in peasant costume; and there is none of the sweaty brawn of Soviet foundry paintings. The workers here lack the grime-encrusted mien and the setting of dirt, oil, melting iron, molds, castings, bleeding rust, and belching flames whose sight and representations brought such rage to Dickens and Carlyle in the England of that day. Even so, the painting’s soot-blackened walls, red faces reflecting the blaze, and overall suggestion of a prison-like inferno are enough to evoke the unpainted reality of gloom, misery, barbaric din, and acrid smells. This disturbing work shows another world from that of Vedenetsky and Khudoyarov and is indeed among the very first, if not the first such representation in Russian art.¹⁰² Of the same period, the serf Vasily Raev’s Workers at the Demidov Factory (GRMFZh, 6185), has the sparks from the foundry illuminate two workers. One seems posed and prettified, the other wild and almost bestial—like some of the Siberian types bonded to such factories, or escaped convicts and drifters.

Life inside the peasant cabin, though frequently described by gentry visitors in fiction and travel literature, is almost absent in painting until the 1820s. The eighteenth-century artists Ivan Eremenov and Mikhail Shibanov offer interesting exceptions. Their scenes of peasant mealtimes invite divergent interpretations. Eremenov’s watercolor Dinner (1770s), one of a series entitled The Poor, shows two men, a mother with infant, and two children at table with a bread loaf and a common bowl of soup into which the family dips. The cabin is dark and the diners’ garments are coarse. Rosalind Gray writes that “the child reaches aggressively for the bowl on the table, suggesting one who does not know when his next meal will be.” These peasants are obviously shown to be “poor.” But the meaning of the boy’s “reach” is arguable because the bowl is further from him than from the men and his arm is shorter; the presence of a large dog near the table expecting to be fed somewhat weakens the notion of the specter of starvation. The Peasants’ Midday Meal (1774) by the serf Mikhail Shibanov shows the head of household, his wife, son, and daughter-in-law who is nursing an infant. The rather raw realistic treatment of the males is offset by the women’s ceremonial headdress. It is, as Gray rightly says, un-idealized yet lacking in social conflict. Fifty years later, Fëdor Solntsev produced Peasant Family Before Dinner (1824) which has the grown son cutting bread, a young boy inspecting the contents of the pot, and the mother and the father, who is mending shoes, looking at each other in less than a cheery manner. Gray reads the painting this way: “the tension between the old woman and the man on the right indicates an internal, domestic conflict brought about by the difficulties of their lifestyle, while the disaffection of the younger man carving bread on the left suggests that he may exacerbate the situation by leaving the familial home to seek his fortune elsewhere.” Since the author cites no external evidence, this judgment remains speculative.¹⁰³

Beyond field and cabin, the chief sites of peasant encounter (except for the meeting of the village commune which, I believe, was never depicted on canvas in this period) were the church, the tavern, and the festival. In the era of serfdom, paintings with religious scenes were reverential. Aside from being aware of the official ban on disrespectful imagery of the church, painters before Perov viewed peasants as naturally religious. An artist known for his popular and sometimes devastating genre scenes, Ignaty Shchedrovsky, became starry-eyed when capturing rural devotional life. His At the Icon (1835) uses bright coloring to render joyful peasant men and women revering an icon of the Virgin Mary at a roadside chapel (GRMFZh, 3730). G. K. Mikhailov in 1841-42 painted a beautiful, devout-looking young woman placing a taper in church.¹⁰⁴ F. A. Goretsky’s Easter Kisses (1850) simplified and prettified the happy act of peasants exchanging the kisses and salutations required on Easter Sunday of Orthodox believers (GRMFZh, 3744). Grigory Chernetsov completed in 1851 a work that may have been sketched out during his and his brother’s Volga voyage: Transfer of the Icon of the Vladimir Virgin. It is an impressive panorama of a river town with peasants standing at various distances from the icon and bowing (GRMFZh-3608).¹⁰⁵ Late in the period F. K. Zhukovsky pictured a Baptism in a Village Church in Orël Province (1859; GRMFZh—no number). The ceremony is attended by peasant villagers—immediate family, relatives, friends—decked out in their best attire, the women in particularly elaborate costumes contrasting with the young father in a recent bowl haircut. The painter has carefully put in all the artifacts of a church service—crucifixes, vestments, candles—to add solemnity to the occasion.

The tavern (traktir) served as a quite different, but equally important, site of peasant community. A fairly cheap eating and drinking place, it could often be found at a hotel or a post house. Less fancy ones stood in or near many villages.¹⁰⁶ Upper-class travelers came to the tavern occasionally, as described in Turgenev and Gogol. As a center of male conviviality and group activity that regularly led to drunkenness, the tavern could hardly be held by artists as an appropriate site of peasant life. And yet at least two surviving works vividly portray what it must have been like. The tavern in I. M. Tonkov’s (1739-99) Village Celebration (1770s) sets up a very fanciful background in front of which we see fighting, shawl dances, a balalaika, and drunkenness (GRMFZh, 7643). The anonymous At the Ale House (Upiteinogo doma, 1850s; fig. 60) offered an exceptionally animated scene containing about fifty figures: soldiers, cavalry officers, nobles, and people of almost every class sit or stand (or are collapsed). A Gypsy dances to the tune of a guitar player. A hurdy-gurdy man with his wife, dogs, and monkey stand nearby. Pairs of drunken men embrace each other. Others harangue, talk, listen, snuff tobacco, smoke pipes, flirt. An arrest for drunken rowdiness is imminent. A mounted officer accepts wine poured by a soldier; another listens to a one-legged veteran. The crowd inside the huge wooden tavern is barely shown through a window. A sorry landscape rears up behind the revelers—a few scraggy trees and a near absence of vegetation, suggesting the shores of the Gulf of Finland near St Petersburg. No moralistic judgment by the artist is in ready evidence (GRMFZh, 2637).¹⁰⁷

Turgenev perhaps provides the reason why tavern interiors were rarely painted. It was not only the conventions of social restraint. Taverns were usually very dark, even by day, as was the case in Turgenev’s story “The Singers” from Notes of a Hunter.¹⁰⁸ Combining a reading of Turgenev with the near contemporary At the Ale House offers a pretty good account of the tavern milieu. Both include figures of vague class origins—ex-serfs, lower-class townspeople, peasants, and workers. But the painting exposes a broader social scope. “The Singers” contains two narratives. One—the singing contest—has become part of the canon of great literature due to its poetic account of rapture and naive art accompanied by the anxiety, embarrassment, and ambition of the singers and the sheer delight of the onlookers. The other, devoid of literary value, is a documentary sketch of that part of everyday life that is so hard to find in other sources: the layout of the site itself, the interaction of people in a drinking establishment, and a concise chronicle of the rapid road to alcoholic oblivion.

Pavel Rizzoni (Ritstsoni, 1823-1913) caused a stir with his renditions of revelry in taverns and wineshops. Son of a Bolognese veteran of Napoleon’s army, he was born in Riga, attended the Academy, and eventually won a pensionate to Europe. Like a few others, he was encouraged to follow his own inclination which led him to post stations, taverns, and low life. In 1845, having been assigned the theme “domestic life,” Rizzoni produced Interior of a Kharchevnya, a very grim study of an eating and drinking establishment in a cellar and its three drunken, drinking, and flirting customers. Around the same time, Rizzoni did a large canvas called Interior of an Ale House ( Piteinyi dom), a free-for-all of alcohol, dancing, and carousing. In 1853, he exhibited Interior of a Wine Shop, a compact picture of lowdown revelry. The Academy at almost every stage heaped medals and other awards on Rizzoni’s works. Not all professors were happy about this. One wrote to a friend in 1853: “And Rizzoni again with his taverns ... and all the nastiness . . . . Well-painted but repulsive and awful; he is no aesthete.” At one Academy exhibit, the poet Apollon Maikov overheard viewers who exclaimed “What kind of subjects are these, there is nothing noble about them”; and who lamented the showing of filth, vulgarity, and drunks. Tsar Nicholas disliked Rizzoni’s Wine Shop and grumbled at an 1853 Academy exhibition about the “monotony and poetic licence in his subjects.”¹⁰⁹ The tsar, who liked pictures of “the simple folk,” turned against low genre that featured simple folks who were drunks. The abstract and state-sponsored notion of Narodnost was hard to sustain in the face of graphic (in both senses of the term) depictions of the real narod in some of its less idyllic moments.

Hard drinking and reveling were common also in family and calendric village festivities. An anonymous and undated picture from this period of a folk fair, Trinity Day at Krasnoe Selo, is set near Moscow on a village street, densely packed with humanity in intimate contact, reveling and dancing near the stalls. Though mass inebriation is not evident, the kinetic abandon and spontaneity associated with the lower classes is on full display as peasants arrive from neighboring villages on an array of conveyances. Another festival, at Alekseevsk near Moscow (presently the site of the Exhibit of Economic Achievements), features folk dancing, and it contrasts the vigorous peasant body motion, gesticulation, and face-to-face male embraces with the restraint of a few nobles in the right foreground. Sternberg’s A Fair in Ukraine (1836-38), a huge panorama in watercolor, brims with ox carts, tents, kegs, and crowds in colorful costumes and hats, including several Hasidic Jews among the fairgoers. A. A. Popov’s (1832-96) rather stiff painting, Folk Scene at the Fair in Staraya Ladoga (1853), takes place on the shore of the Volkhov river near art patron Tomilov’s manor. The tone is restrained—only a dozen figures, dancing, a balalaika, some storytelling and flirtation, and a hint of drink. Gruzinsky’s 1861 Village Celebration (GRMFZh, 780) is a winter scene set around the time of emancipation but with no allusion to it. Three peasants and a driver on a troika are being seen off by their women. The men look happy and perhaps a bit inebriated as they set out for the next village.¹¹⁰

Several scenes indicate that people from neighboring villages were as welcome to a festival as were the far-flung neighbors of the gentry to their entertainments. An excess of drinking was expected in peasant feasts which often lasted for days. Higher forms of disorder, of course, were not shown in art or in any public forum. Russia was not that different from the rest of Europe in setting up rules and tacit understandings about the limits on expression. Arson, village murders and beatings, seigniorial punishments, religious dissidence, acts of resistance, witchcraft accusations, military reprisals, and arrests were naturally beyond the pale, though some of these were regular features of peasant life.¹¹¹ As to the last, it was again Perov who broke a rule in The Arrival of the Police Inspector in 1857.

The only violence in a peasant’s life permitted on canvas was combat, and here the masses locked in battle were often indistinguishable from officers. There were no courts martial, executions, or running the gauntlet. Presentation of the peasant’s military experience was limited to recruiting scenes. Frederick Starr cites among the permissible genre subjects at the Academy in the 1810s “A Recruit Parting from his Family.” In 1839, Venetsianov did a pair of recruit paintings, showing departure and return, a common device in European art, though I have not seen them. Felitsin in Sorrowful Tidings (1851) offered a somewhat prettified picture of a mourning widow of a Crimean War soldier.¹¹² The literature suggests that recruitment from among village peas ants was treated as equivalent to a death sentence—which indeed it was for an exorbitantly high percentage of Russian soldiers who perished from war and disease. Recorded cases of self-mutilation were fairly common as were other less dramatic modes of evasion. Corrupt exemption practices often favored well-off potential draftees. After a twenty-five-year term in the army, if he survived, the ex-soldier entered a kind of “homeless class,” unwanted in the native village. Married life for an active soldier was extremely difficult to maintain, and the burden of it fell just as harshly on the wife.¹¹³ None of this was reflected in the art of military or any other kind of painters.

Although a newspaper (Russkii Invalid) was partly devoted to surviving veterans, they played a humble role in Russian society, often as gatehouse or road guards,¹¹⁴ just as in Soviet times they were used as hotel doormen. G. I. Bortnevsky (b. 1828), himself a veteran of the Moscow Bodyguard Regiment, won the title Artist at the Academy 1859 for his Dinner of Invalids (GRMFZh, 3759) which shows a vast dining hall with the gray-haired ex-soldiers, mostly peasants, seated side by side at mess. It is a moving snapshot of this usually neglected corner of society: seasoned old men of the ranks sitting erect for their picture proudly painted by one of their number.

A Provincial Gallery

For painters who lived in or visited the lands beyond the capitals, the provincial town as a topographical subject held less interest than did its residents, particularly gentry and merchants who could commission portraits. But a pair of paintings of each of two very different towns—a spa and a provincial capital—offer a few clues about how Venetsianov’s pupils Krylov and Krendovsky saw small-town life. Two studies of around 1824, attributed to Nikifor Krylov, show patients taking the curative waters in the town of Bezhetsk in Tver Province. The first foregrounds what looks like a family of peasants or townspeople. A couple is helping a faltering man from a cart down to the waters of the spa; in the background, citizens of various classes stand on the shore and watch the patients bathing. The second centers on a local landowner, named in the title, who is about to undergo treatment as well. In the distance, boats, a church, banners, and town buildings seem to suggest the common enterprise of this town and perhaps a touch of civic pride.¹¹⁵ Both pictures give the town a fairytale quality, implying, perhaps, the miraculous nature of its curative powers.

The Ukrainian provincial capital Poltava was put on canvas by artists of different periods, both focusing on Alexandrovsky Square, the town’s symbolic center. Academy painter F. Ya. Alexeev’s 1808 version might be called an official urban portrait: a panorama of grand Empire-style edifices with the governor’s palace off to the right and an Alexander Column in the middle of the square. The vast, frigid, and nearly empty space overwhelms the few figures converging upon the column as if in pious deference to their emperor. With Evgraf Krendovsky’s Alexander Square in Poltava (1830-1840s), the “bourgeoisification” of the town becomes palpable. At the rear stands the same complex of white stone neoclassical buildings with Corinthian columns, balcony, and archways for vehicles. To the left stand a chapel and a few simple but substantial houses. Ukrainian peasants guide a caravan of ox carts through the square in whose huge expanse are seen clusters of officers, officials, and gentry; a female water-bearer, a delivery boy, families, livestock, and conveyances of all sorts. Although the figures in the middle distance are still dwarfed by the immensity of the square, that space, rendered forbidding in 1808, is now a busy site where work and leisure cross each other. The earlier monumentality has been diminished by the buzz of town life (fig. 61).¹¹⁶

Lower-class provincial townspeople inhabit canvases mostly as a supporting cast for topographical studies, as in the works mentioned above, and in genre scenes of popular festivities. Aside from a few priests, only the nobles and merchants of provincial towns sat for portraits. Beginning in the eighteenth century, portraits of merchants, their wives, petty officials, and traders appeared in Russia by the thousands, most of them by unknown artists. Though often labeled “primitivist,” their approach, unlike the neoprimitive schools of the fin de siècle, was unself-conscious and derived from both the skill levels of the artists and the accumulation of conventions. A stylized art that drew on iconography and folk art forms, provincial portraits were stiff three-quarter parade studies of prominent local figures and some family ensembles. Already by the mid-eighteenth century, in the words of James Cracraft, “such portraiture, however rusticated, had become a fixture of the cultural life of provincial Russian society.”¹¹⁷

The Yaroslav provincial school of portraiture emerged among a half-dozen artists of the early nineteenth century. I. V. Tarkhanov (1780-1848), the son of an Uglich priest, in the 1820s through the 1840s painted gentry, officials, townspeople, and merchants; the merchant patronage far outnumbered that of all others combined. They and their wives were dressed slightly upscale and posed in the traditional manner with head and eyes turned in opposing directions. Tarkhanov in 1837 painted an unknown subject sitting at a window in the town of Uglich, holding a paper with books nearby (fig. 62). The familiar folds of a curtain provide background; beard, hair style, and shirt ( rubashka) sticking out from under the vest reveal his merchant identity. Nikolai Mylnikov (1797-1842), who signed his portraits in French, presented his subjects as good-looking people possessing dignity rather than arrogance. In his badly cracked self-portrait, Mylnikov is indistinguishable from a metropolitan-educated noble of the 1830s. An anonymous family portrait puts a patriarchal father in the center and ranges the others according to place in the family; the artist is lost when it comes to realistic limbs, body postures, relative size, and perspective. Soviet editors of the Yaroslav collection claimed that these pictures represent a “democratic tendency” rarely found in the capitals—again referring to the social origins of the subjects.¹¹⁸

A good sense of provincial portrait imagery can be gained by viewing, alongside the 134-piece Yaroslav collection, that of Nikolai Mikhailovich Romanov, whose approximately one thousand pictures, mostly of the noble estate, include many from the provinces. Portrait subjects from the provincial gentry, officialdom, merchants of different guilds, and factory owners have all spent time and trouble preparing for the sittings, and the poses are clearly organized with little trace of spontaneity. Merchants and their wives display a spectrum of social and national self-imaging. At one end stand the stiff and traditionally-garbed kupets and kupchikha directing a kind of uneasy glower at the viewer and the painter. Some resemble stout boyars in nineteenth-century dress. At the other end, merchants from the neck down are hardly distinguishable from the gentry. Mylnikov in particular has his male sitters dress in a socially nonreferential manner, but topped by the easily recognized “merchant” head with bowl haircut and some kind of facial hair. The male, in dressing “upward,” resorts to a European look, while his wife, though arrayed in very expensive garments, remains completely Russian in appearance. Thus, social mobility, status striving, and a certain amount of “denationalization” are strictly gendered. Among all these types, one stands out like a sore thumb: what seems to be a quintessential provincial intelligent in a portrait entitled Man with a Book.¹¹⁹

The modified parade style in merchant portraits by the now better-known painters reflected the same kind of social mimicry.¹²⁰ G. A. Krylov’s Portrait of a Rzhevsk Merchant (1830s) recalls once again an increasingly ambivalent self-image. The merchant appears uncompromisingly “mercantile” in his beard and haircut, his ample torso, and the plain green fabric which endeavors to contain it. The unbuttoned look and the uneasy pose bespeak a contempt for elegance. And yet the awkwardly placed elbow of this captain of commerce rests beside two expensively bound books.¹²¹ Tropinin’s portrait of the merchant’s wife Kiselëva (née Lazareva) in the early 1830s lacks the conventional furniture of an eighteenth-century formal portrait, but the subject is clothed in a luxurious bright red dress under an opulent green velvet gown with fur collar. Clues to her merchant status are seen in the clenched hand, the intense outward gaze, and the bizarre hair style.¹²² But the same painter’s 1842 portrait of I. I. Kiselëv of Shuya,¹²³ a wealthy merchant and presumably her husband, makes him almost a double of the elegant Victor Hugo as painted by Achille Deveria in 1829.

The imaging of provincial and Moscow merchants in portraiture had little resonance in society at large. Few people ever saw the portraits with their positive and ambiguous messages. They were in any case rendered irrelevant by the critical depiction of the merchantry on stage, in print, and on canvas. The genre paintings of the 1840s by Pavel Fedotov (1815-52) reversed the conventions of portraiture and bombarded the merchant with ridicule. Fedotov, like the playwright Ostrovsky, eagerly investigated the social interior. In preparation for a work, he would associate with merchants for weeks at a time in order to study their habits. As he put it in 1844: “Very little of my work—about a tenth—takes place in the studio. My most important work is on the streets and in strange houses. I study life.” Fedotov’s satirical canvases enlivened bourgeois interiors with episodes from merchant life. The Choosy Bride (1847), based on a story by Ivan Krylov, opens on the latest chapter in the implied narrative of the courtship experience of a merchant maid who has rejected too many suitors and is now being proposed to by a kneeling elderly hunchback. The Major’s Marriage Proposal (1848) seems to blast both the merchant bride and the gentry officer who is nervously proposing. The bride coyly turns her back to the suitor, the family remonstrates with her, and the major, like a melodrama villain, twirls his waxed moustache. Social types were clearly recognizable to contemporaries in this easy-to-read domestic narrative: the matchmaker wears a short jacket or katsaveika, used by elderly common people to help hide corpulence. The bride is attired in a dress called ''St. Gene" after a then popular Victor Sardou play about the Napoleonic era.¹²⁴

Fedotov enjoyed a brilliant success at the Academy exhibition of these pictures, although it soon turned against him and the government made his life difficult. The public was delighted and no one at the time seems to have objected to or even noticed the cruelty and misogyny in these works, intended or not. A few years after Fedotov’s death a friend related that a real-life army major had come to thank the artist for The Major’s Marriage Proposal and described his own happy marriage. Socially minded Russian critics then and in Soviet (and post-Soviet) times celebrated what they saw to be Fedotov’s justified attack on the hypocrisy and vulgarity of the middle classes. In 1997, while standing in front of The Major’s Marriage Proposal, I overheard a Russian guide at the Tretyakov Gallery tell a group of school children that the quality of clothing and goods in the bride’s home acted as a superficial lure for the major into a union that would eventually lead to disillusion and divorce! Another treatment of merchant marriage, Adrian Volkov’s Breach of Promise (1860), had a reneging groom exposed and shamed as the jilted bride faints and the bearded merchants express indignation.¹²⁵ Fedotov’s and other satirical slams at merchant life made no dent in the market for merchant-patronized portraits which flourished and grew right up to the Revolution. But the satire did foreshadow the kind of merchant-bashing that the radical intelligentsia would unleash in a steady stream.

Though always visible in high art, the nobility began to appear on canvas in guises that went well beyond those found in panegyric portrait and manorial painting. The eventless paintings of palatial halls, galleries, and ceremonial staircases of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries declined in favor of more intimate interiors. But even many of these retained the academic use of enfilade, deep focus, doorways, and perspective. That quintessential Academy figure, F. P. Tolstoy, painted a conversation piece set in his flat at the Academy, Family Portrait (1830), that shows off its big enfiladed rooms extending deep into space. The classic severity of the composition is relieved by the living beings—Tolstoy in Byronic garb, his wife in Restoration style, the daughters in matching gowns; a dog in the central room; and bashful servants peeking around the door in the distant background. Interior painters beyond the capital employed the enfilade approach, and the inhabitants who filled the rows of rooms thawed out the chill of purely spatial representation and created an appealing mix of order and disorder. As Rosalind Gray has aptly put it, human activity in these works overshadowed “the glory of the architectural surroundings.” When seen indoors, in settings less formal than the pompous backgrounds of the parade portrait, unposed figures in motion or action appeared more relaxed and human.¹²⁶ The renderings were of course sanitized, and rarely did the viewer behold the real dirt and shabbiness of some gentry households, frequently recorded in the provinces by the fastidious Filipp Vigel.¹²⁷ In the resulting vernacular interior genre, though often inspired by the early Dutch and Flemish works and contemporary Biedermeier, the tone was native.

The gentry’s self-regarding outlook is still evident in paintings that included the family pictures on the wall so as to double the viewing pleasure.¹²⁸ Amateur nobles with a flair for drawing made album sketches of their families.¹²⁹ N. Kh. Karsten (Carstén), a Swede from Finland and a Russian citizen, painted The Polovtsov Family (GRMFZh, 5820) on their estate near St. Petersburg in the 1830s or 1840s. The elaborate conventions of family grouping by age, gender, costume, and pairing of spouses are on full display.¹³⁰ On the Balcony (1851) by Fëdor Slavyansky has his mother-in-law, his wife, an infant, two children playing, and himself standing at the door of the balcony in a remarkably modern manner and with an almost photographic picturing of conversation among these obviously wealthy people.¹³¹ Although paintings of domestic scenes in France and England, even in the eighteenth century, possessed a much greater range of situations, narratives, characters, and relationships,¹³² the Russian equivalents were coming into their own. As John Bowlt has rightly observed of this neglected genre, the interior study offered the everyday life of families in a Russian “domestic art movement.”¹³³

Although the dinner table played an important role in the life of gentry families, it is rarely depicted in art about that life.¹³⁴ Instead we see family members reading, frolicking with a dog, dancing, working. Artists have gone beyond the self-portrait to group studies of themselves. In Tyranov’s The Chernetsov Brothers’ Studio (1828), the brothers have put aside the palette and are relaxing in an intimate setting, one playing a guitar. In Zelentsov’s Studio of P. V. Basin (1833) four painter friends, with a bearded old man as the model, happily avail themselves of ample studio space and abundant light.¹³⁵ V. I. Sternberg, a friend of the composer Glinka, was present at the Chernigov estate of Grigory Tarnovsky. Sternberg’s remarkable 1838 painting has Glinka at work with a colleague on his opera Ruslan and Lyudmila. Sternberg is at the easel. Obviously a place of work, this gray-walled, austere, even grim interior with high ceiling looks out onto an equally colorless landscape. The whole atmosphere suggests seriousness and professionalism, and indeed the first full rehearsal of the completed Ruslan took place in Tarnovsky’s serf theater.¹³⁶

Though nobles got gently panned often enough in fiction and drama,¹³⁷ they remained relatively exempt from hostile treatment in portraits and genre works until the 1840s when the iconoclastic Fedotov began roasting them. His An Aristocrat’s Breakfast (1849) rudely debunks an impoverished noble caught by an unexpected knock on the door while consuming his modest repast. His renowned Fresh Cavalier (1846) takes on a newly decorated official flaunting his self-importance in a theatrical quasi-Roman pose in the midst of domestic squalor which includes a drunken policeman under the table. Gogol’s “Medal of St. Vladimir,” a tale that deals with lobbying for a decoration, inspired this painting. As if to emphasize the lowly manners and taste of the subject, Fedotov has him ranting at his cook-concubine; and makes him out to be a fan of Bulgarin, one of whose books lies on the floor. The sympathetic critic Apollon Maikov, echoing things said about the theater of the time, announced that “the ire of a clerk at his cook is as worthy of attention in art as the wrath of Achilles.” But this work was excluded from the exhibition of 1851 and forbidden to be lithographed until the medal was removed and the painting renamed Morning After a Party.¹³⁸ Fedotov’s Encore, Encore! of 1851-52 made a more subtle and much sadder comment on gentry types. A retired officer—Fedotov knew the type very well—is enwrapped in futility and boredom in a provincial hole, lying in bed and putting his dog through its tricks over and over again in a taut compression of the type known in literature as the “superfluous man.”

Outdoors we find gentry, who had always featured prominently in battle and parade scenes or on their estates, also expanding their roles. Fedotov, himself an army man, caught a detachment of officers in the watercolor Bivouac of the Pavlovsky Regiment of Life Guards (1841-42).¹³⁹ Resting on the march to maneuvers or an encampment, these men, though bearing a kind of collective identity through their uniforms and their obviously common enterprise, are individualized in actions and poses in a way that contrasts sharply with the familiar parade scenes of St. Petersburg. Though just barely an outdoor scene, A. F. Chernyshev’s 1850 Departure (Farewell of an Officer to His Family) can be fruitfully compared to a real-life serf recruitment with its dirgelike quality. At a modest gentry home in a village, a priest stands in the door, and a young friend or brother offers the departing officer a bottle. The mother hovers by her son, who kisses his wife while keeping a foot on the axle of the coach. The coachman, true to form, waits patiently. On the right, older men chat, perhaps about their time in the service. Peasants, children, servants, and assorted figures fill in the row of people which stretches from the little manor to a village hut and, behind it, a church—seeming to depict an emotional solidarity that binds the whole community.¹⁴⁰ Chernyshev’s departing officer shows no sign of resistance—after all, officers were not “recruited”; but the point is how greatly this gentry officer has been reduced from earlier representations in the parade portrait, the miniature, the manorial landscape. Now he—like the peasant—seems to have lost agency and elevation.

Among the most lively of male gentry pleasures was the hunt. Unlike England with its hunt clubs, balls, costumes, and other forms of ritualized social practice, Russians tended to hunt alone or in small groups.¹⁴¹ The largest ensemble that I have seen on canvas is Evgraf Krendovsky, Gathering for the Hunt (1836), a tiny interior showing four men with their guns, dog, and boots.¹⁴² The twenty-four-year-old Konstantin Krugovikhin (1815-?), while a student at the Academy, offered a typical scene in Landscape and Hunter in Pavlovsk Park (1837) of a clump of birches, a dog, and a lone officer facing away from the viewer.¹⁴³ In the same year, Ignaty Shchedrovsky, his fellow student, produced The Hunters, a photo-like representation. In the foreground, drawn from a low perspective, the diagonal postures of the two sportsmen are replicated—according to an old formula—by two listing trees. A horseman stands on the horizon. A village at the left is indistinct and the idyllic atmosphere is enhanced by the contrast of the rosy dawn sky and the rich green vegetation. The same artist’s Landscape with Hunters (1847) has a mounted nobleman, his servant on foot carrying the gun, asking a peasant for directions—a common scene in literature and in real life. The unrivaled guide through this world is Ivan Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter, whose imagery may have been partly shaped by pictures like those described above. But his keen up-close observation tells us much more than do landscape artists about rural society. Turgenev matches the visuals of gun-bearing serfs but adds their habit of running behind the master’s conveyance or horse. Unlike the graphic art of the era, he describes the ragged garments of the peasants and their lapses in servility that regularly occurred in remote places, taverns, and post houses.¹⁴⁴

There are no paintings of nobles on foot or horseback surveying the field work of their peasants, consulting with a steward, or engaging in many other noble pursuits in the great outdoors. But artists sometimes found on the Russian highways and byways much material for genre art. Picturing modes of travel could combine some social commentary with landscape, dramatic action, and current vehicular technology. B. Swebach, a Swiss who worked in Russia in 1820s, romanticized a winter sledge in Troika (1819; GRMFZh, 168). N. E. Sverchkov’s Travelers (1855) juxtaposes the swift course of a tarantas with an officer or official on board and a mounted escort out in front hurtling along on business as the relatively immobile peasants watch it go by (GRMFZh, 5833). A strong sense of what things were like in the post houses described so often in literature is offered in V. V. Samoilov’s 1854 Posting Station (GRMFZh, 3735). In a rural hamlet, the church and the rough wooden station house flank the muddy road where a wheel is being changed in a setting of utter desolation. Just as bleak is Gruzinsky’s On the Road (1859; GRMFZh, 9150), with a telega or village cart carrying a lone soldier sitting on straw and a driver up front. The unsprung cart looks like an upside-down coffin.

While artists painstakingly sought new objects to put on canvas, the distribution of graphic art widened with the growth of new reproductive techniques. The establishment of the first lithographic workshop in Petersburg in 1816 quickened mass output of cheap reproductions. The Society for the Encouragement of Artists, declaring that “national honor” demanded sharing pictures of Russian popular life, commissioned such scenes, lithographed them, and then sent them off not only to the provincial art schools but to artists in Mogilëv, Orël, Tula, Pskov, Simbirsk, Yaroslavl, Vyatka, Kharkov, Irkutsk, and other places. Through this and other channels, works by Venetsianov, Orlovsky, and others reached a broad public. Ignaty Shchedrovsky (1815-70), the son of a poor official, went to St. Petersburg in 1833, attended the Academy, and became a Free Artist. In the 1830s, at the behest of the society, he executed thirty-six Scenes of Russian National Life. In the 1840s he produced more such scenes in Here Are Our People! (Vot nashi!), whose very title indicated a determination to introduce the Russian people to themselves. The album went into three editions and popularized the “everyday life genre” (bytovoi zhanr) that would flourish in the last half of the century. All this was supplemented with book illustrations that matched the content of the physiologies and provincial sketches and reached into the places they were describing and depicting.¹⁴⁵

Petersburg: Cityscape, City Folk

A kind of visual database for Imperial Russia’s most important city exists in a book of 231 superb reproductions entitled Pushkin's Petersburg, conveniently divided into the periods 1800-1820 and the 1820s to 1830s. Other published and archival visual sources help fill the gap up to the 1850s.¹⁴⁶ Although little changed in actual Petersburg society, a great deal did in visual human geography. As time progressed, staffage figures of lower-class urbanites—small, distant, often turned away from the viewer, and clad in nondescript garb—get bigger, closer, and more legible as individual human beings. New sections of the city, back streets, and courtyards come into view, filled with socially diverse people. Elite spaces remain that way most of the time: Palace, Admiralty, and Mikhailovsky Squares; the Swan Canal, the English Embankment, and the gated and restricted Summer Garden. Exceptions for the first two are made for parades and folk fairs. Sadovaya Street from the Nevsky down to and including Haymarket Square are favorite sites for artists who want to capture the steaming and bubbling life of the lower classes. Men, women, and children move through the streets and sidewalks, courtyards and squares—jostling, bargaining, and clearly making raucous noise. The largest mixed assemblies appear at festival time near the Admiralty and in suburban Ekaterinhof. Congregations of every class intermix especially often along the Nevsky at the canal intersections, on bridges, and at the Kazan Cathedral, the City Duma, Gostiny Dvor, and the Anichkov Palace. Parades, far from diminishing, have grown in frequency and in numbers—as have spectators from among commoners.

The discovery of the countryside and provinces and their mysterious inhabitants had its analogue in a kind of excavation of the “unknown city.” For a long time, academic art by convention or design had tended to treat the urban masses as passive spectators, ignoring or marginalizing their occupations, their spontaneity, and the everyday material goods surrounding them. But side by side with the monumental rendering of the capital, other representations—including those by academy-trained artists—began to unveil a city less Venetian, more Russian, though sometimes marked by official rhetoric even when the subject is the throb of commerce as in I. A. Ivanov’s Gostiny Dvor (1815), where ordinary citizens are flanked by a marching platoon and a guard post.¹⁴⁷ V. R. Zotov, a theater man with a keen eye, ear, and nose, called the bridges of St. Petersburg “our Roman forum,” where the lower classes hung about at the four corners to trade, gossip, meet up, or idle away the hours.¹⁴⁸ Bridges indeed loomed large in the physiology of St. Petersburg, and they attracted more than just the plebs. F. Ya. Alexeev’s view of Kazan Cathedral from across the Nevsky Prospect in the 1810s foregrounds the upper and lower worlds of the great city: gentlemen and townsmen look down from the bridge at the washerwomen up to their knees in the waters of the Catherine Canal. Sadovnikov, in an 1830 watercolor of the Anichkov Bridge over the Fontanka Canal, wrought an engaging and complex composition of the crowd in conversation groups that included a red-nosed merchant, a peasant couple, vendors, assorted gentry and military, a bridge guard, and sundry conveyances. Many views captured watch boats sailing beneath the bridge. Lesser-known works jumbled balcony viewers, marching troops, noble families in carriages with footmen, and the grittier world of people washing and working along the canals.¹⁴⁹

The new urban art, though always bearing traces of the old, distinguished itself for the most part by differentiating social types more sharply than before and thus endowing them with clear markers of identity. Massed scenes depicted commoners at play; both the panoramic paintings and the focused genre works showed people in the act of commerce and even physical labor. Urban entertainments naturally attracted many kinds of representation. Foreign eyes exoticized them, Russian popular prints showed “the people” to themselves, and Russian professional artists found new subjects and objects to celebrate. The acceleration of urban literary exploration began in the 1840s with a burst of feuilletons and “physiological sketches”; and literary works about the low, the lower, and the lowest depths were sometimes called daguerreotypes because of their photographic or documentary realism. These verbal and illustrated “local-color sketches of urban life and social types”¹⁵⁰ were quickly imitated by writers of fiction. The physiologies and the 1846 St. Petersburg Collection, with works by Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, and others, were criticized as the “natural school” by Bulgarin, who coined the term; and they were conversely praised by Belinsky and other Westernizers.¹⁵¹ Although one of the main works of this epoch, the 1845 Physiology of St. Petersburg, had poor graphics, better artists began following the trend.

Alexander Orlovsky (Orlowski, 1777-1832), a Polish-born artist in Russian service since 1802, earned the name “quick pencil” for his impressions of Petersburg street life. He met the everyday of common people head-on in scores of anecdotal scenes decades before Fedotov, and with greater range. His corpus included an 1808 oil painting of a staggering drunk. His 1820 pictures titled Coachmen's Bazaar and Cabbies' Market put expressive features on the drivers' faces and pictured a dozen animated conversations and transactions whose tone can almost be “read” from the skillfully captured gesturing of autonomous individuals. His St. Petersburg Winter Market (1820s) pulsates with livestock, horses, dogs, tradesmen, women, goods, and sleds bunched near a wooden cabin on the stone-framed square—a veritable re-creation of a village in the midst of the granite capital (fig. 63). Orlovsky seemed to delight in crafting the details and rough textures of the buildings and the athletic movements of his subjects.¹⁵² The kinds of realia not often shown and less remembered from prose treatments are abundant and memorable in graphics: a heated guard booth; a snack stand with vodka tumblers at the ready; booths for milk, tobacco, and fuel—items so utterly familiar to residents of the capital that it was perhaps natural for only the visual artist to have seen their value as signifiers. Memoirs and stories about theater rarely mention what theatergoers saw dozens or scores of times: the coachmen’s fire pavilions near the theaters where the drivers drank tea, chatted, and kept warm as their masters enjoyed opera or ballet inside.¹⁵³

The gap between the social visibility of certain types and their near absence in literature is greatest in the case of the street vendors and physical laborers. Speaking generally of Europe, Peter Burke observed that “images offer particularly valuable evidence of practices such as street trading which were rarely recorded because of their relatively unofficial nature.”¹⁵⁴ Nosilshchiki—street vendors with portable trays of fruit or dry goods—were omnipresent in Petersburg and other cities, and from the 1820s onward inhabit lithographs, paintings, and later on photographs and postcards. They sometimes pose alone as “types” and sometimes stand amid the monumental architecture of the capital.¹⁵⁵ Foodstuff dominated the trade of peddlers, mostly peasants from nearby villages, uncountable though licensed. Venetsianov in the 1810s drew some vivid scenes of interclass bargaining in Near the St. Petersburg Bourse and Horse Market in St. Petersburg, the latter at least hinting at a class-leveling effect in the marketplace. The Magic Lantern, an 1817 journal attributed to him, bulges with pictures of street vendors that were later copied onto porcelain statuettes.¹⁵⁶ Gruzinsky’s Street Scene (1861) adds another touch of realism to his picture of a woman selling eggs and herrings from her sleigh: two drunks blissfully asleep in a classic pose beneath a lamppost (GRMFZh, 1445).

Haymarket Square, the city’s busiest venue for street trade, served as a lively setting for the “slum” novels of Krestovsky and Dostoevsky.¹⁵⁷ Neither has the exuberance of an 1820 lithograph of the busy Sadovaya Street, at a point near the Haymarket, where officers, vendors, women, and men engage in an endless bustle of buying and selling, haranguing, begging, and solicitation among a rich mosaic of social types.¹⁵⁸ Adrian Volkov’s Haymarket, done at the time in which the above-mentioned novels are set, even more vividly captures the excitement of men changing the wheel of a diligence, semicriminal elements lurking around, and fun-lovers on a rampage near the picturesque Haymarket Church (GRMFZh, 2636). Volkov (1827-74) achieved notoriety and a minor silver medal at the Academy for a related work, Glutton Row in St. Petersburg (1858), which delves even deeper into the tawdry yet animated life of the capital, with haggling traders and drunks staggering and prone in a dismal courtyard.¹⁵⁹

When it came to depicting work in the city, artisanry and hard physical labor fell far behind commercial activity in representation. The caretaker or building and yard man (dvornik), found in almost every residential building, appears rarely, and even more rarely at work. V. I. Dahl’s Janitor (1844), garbed in peak cap, vest, shirt, and apron, presides over the doors and gates of his empire—entryways, staircases, and the courtyard littered with broken-down coaches—and sweeps with a long broom.¹⁶⁰ The courtyard represented what one scholar has called “the great democratizing pause in the otherwise overly official Imperial capital”; and its dvornik (as a police informant) the link between courtyard and officialdom.¹⁶¹ Scenes of wharves, river and canal banks, and bridges almost always contain some kind of work, including that of washerwomen, ferrymen, and occasionally shipbuilders. In Benjamin Patersen’s Police Bridge of the 1810s, three stonemasons on the Moika near Nevsky Prospect are at work in a clear division of tasks—one wheeling, one crushing, and one shaping—as a well-dressed gentry couple look the other way. In an 1820s lithograph, about a hundred men are building supports for the new St. Isaac’s Bridge across the Neva at Senate Square.¹⁶² Aside from these, very little gang work made it to canvas or print by Russian artists.

Large-scale collective labor appeared even more rarely in urban art. Over a hundred “factories”—enterprises defined as employing sixteen or more workers—operated in St. Petersburg at the end of this era. I have found no scenes of work inside these, which included the state arsenal and the shipbuilding and repair shops. Thousands of workers performed arduous labor in teams every day across the city under the public’s gaze. In 1839 alone, some six thousand laborers toiled continuously in the construction of the enormous St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and an unknown number were at work rebuilding the Winter Palace, recently consumed by fire, at top speed in time for a royal wedding.¹⁶³ Theaters, circuses, and other buildings that burned down had to rebuilt. But the intensive, bone-killing labor on these construction sites was ignored in favor of the superstructures and materials. One of Sadovnikov’s late 1830s or early 1840s watercolors of the building of St. Isaac’s Cathedral (1818-58) shows the scaffolding and the caravan of stone-hauling horses—but no workers. The only depiction of laborers was done by the architect of that church, the Frenchman Auguste Montferrand. His 1830s watercolor, At the Construction of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, prominently features about forty workmen straining with levers and pulleys at the base of the massive half-finished structure as well-dressed gentry look on. The grunt and pain of urban labor had yet to find either realistic or even poetic treatment among Russian artists.¹⁶⁴

It has long been noted that beggars almost disappeared from Russian art after the eighteenth century. Ivan Eremenev (or Ermenëv, 1746 or 1749?-1790), the son of a stable boy, finished the Academy of Arts in 1767. Between working on baroque historical and biblical studies, he did eight watercolors known as The Poor (mid-1760s-1775). Dinner, a peasant family around a common bowl, has been discussed above. Poor Woman with Little Girl and Blind Singers are drenched in misery. Beggars (early 1770s) depicts an old (though ageless) man and woman halting along with the help of canes—he with a hobo bag, she stooped over and dressed in patched clothes.¹⁶⁵ Their open-mouthed agony recalls not only Hogarth but even Goya. As a whole, these pictures depicted the suffering of lower-class people at a descriptive level found not only among none of Eremenev’s contemporaries but in the work of no other artist until the 1850s. Orlovsky’s Poor Peasants at a Carriage (1816) does not come close; less still do the occasional staffage beggars planted among the crowds in other urban pictures.

Where have all the poor gone in the reign of Nicholas I? Indigent people appeared in prints and journal illustrations, but hardly at all in painting. Expressive culture dealing with poverty is an interpretive minefield. It raises the problem of definition. The characters in Dostoevsky’s epistolary novella whose title is usually translated as Poor Folk were unfortunate or “afflicted people” rather than completely impoverished ones. Their cramped and vulnerable lives were lived inside four walls. If we identify the poorest of the poor with homelessness and beggary, another factor surfaces. Overreacting Petersburg police believed and reported that many beggars were fakes, members of criminal gangs who made a living—meager as it might have been—with tin cups and canes on the streets or at church doors. Indeed, the state considered this fluid mass who came in and out of the city at will a public menace. It was not easy to distinguish “pious pilgrims and deserving poor” from “itinerant thieves.”¹⁶⁶ It may be that, since the periodic police round-up campaigns were known to the public, painters shied away from such a problematic subject for art—even when capturing in genre the lesser-known corners of urban life. Certainly arbiters of taste frowned upon mixing high art with harsh realities.¹⁶⁷

One may stroll along the Nevsky with Gogol or hear a character in Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov a few decades later say: “Not to go to Ekaterinhof on the first of May? ... Everyone will be there!” without ever feeling the brimming activity that made St. Petersburg and its entertainment suburbs so vital. A lithograph after an 1835 sketch of Thimm, set on St. Petersburg’s St. Isaac’s Square, the massive and nearly completed cathedral in the background, does just this. The subject is a folk fair to mark the pre-Lenten festivities. All the usual amusements are on hand for socially mixed citizens on fairground rides or lining up for tickets to the booth show. Thimm’s large picture combines several genres: a perspective study that uses the Admiralty spire and symmetrical buildings as the frame; a military parade whose mounted guards are shooing pedestrians away from a cortege of gentry; and the huge double ice-hill in the center, flanked by Leman’s Circus and a booth theater.¹⁶⁸ The richness of information in this picture and its compositional strategy convey the experience of a moment in the heart of the city that no other medium except film could capture.

Not even graphic artists could recreate the city’s noise, odors, temperature, and atmosphere. V. R. Zotov tells us for example that Gorokhovaya Street smelled of freshly baked bread, while from other sites emanated the aroma of leather boots, eggs, kvass, or mushrooms.¹⁶⁹ Missing also from urban pictorial representation is the sound track, what a contemporary collection of pictures called ''the cries of Petersburg:"¹⁷⁰ the cacophonous symphony of barking dog, vendor’s pitch, drill sergeant’s sharp command, hooves of carriage horses, cabmen’s cries, the jangle of spurs, the creaking and clanking of gear, and the report of the daily cannon shot across the river. Earlier cityscapists who celebrated the momentous and magnificent city of stone and water were content to maintain a dignified silence. But as the midcentury drew near, artists at least attempted to suggest the tactile, kinetic, and olfactory emanations of the city, and to “score” their graphic dramas with implied sounds, the reverse of what opera and, later, film composers sought to do.

The quest for the whole metropolis was of course never completed. As in the provinces, certain sectors of human experience failed to make it to the canvas, sketch paper, or print shop. There were things, as Bulgarin put it in 1845, “from which the well-bred person averts his eyes.” Such things included the public display of serfs for sale in the city’s courtyards in the 1790s.¹⁷¹ The omissions cannot simply be attributed to the dark repression of the tsars and their censors. Training in the conventions, opportunity, and personal taste came into play. The lag in representing industrial scenes reflected comparative economic history, and in this Russia resembled many parts of Europe. Important is not so much what artists failed to depict as the new things they did depict. Gradually in the reign of Alexander I and more rapidly under his successor, “the most numerous classes” of the great metropolis had found their way into art, and, if often “typed” or caricatured, had at least emerged from the invisible realm of exclusion.

Photo Finish

Siegfried Kracauer, the early twentieth-century film psychoanalyst, likened Louis-Jacques Daguerre (1789-1851), the inventor of the daguerreotype in 1839, to the historian Leopold von Ranke, in that both of them selected, framed, and organized material for presentation—one visually, the other in print.¹⁷² It has been variously argued that the English squire William Fox Talbot and the Russian infantry officer Alexei Grekov invented what became the photograph simultaneously with Daguerre. Certainly researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences were already at work on light pictures. Quite remarkable was the rapid spread of the new technology via the printed word to the rest of Europe. In the United States, technological wizardry and instant marketing created an industry in Philadelphia and New York within a year of Daguerre’s invention in France, and in 1840 the world’s first photo studio opened in New York.¹⁷³

Russia's photographic pioneer, Alexei Grekov (1799-1850s?), a Yaroslav gentry officer, engineer, and government official, came to St. Petersburg in 1836 to work for Moscow News, the government organ. He reproduced images on a metal plate and displayed his findings in 1840. He opened a studio or “Artistic Cabinet” in Moscow in 1840, and in 1841 published an anonymous pamphlet entitled The Painter Without Brush or Paint, showing how to make all kinds of likenesses in minutes and how to pose subjects. As Russia’s first professional portrait photographer, Grekov made images “the size of a small snuffbox” and sat his subjects in a special posing chair with a cushion for the head. Unfortunately, none of his works has survived. Studios quickly appeared in other Russian towns and people lined up to have their pictures taken. Bulgarin’s journal Northern Bee reported on Daguerre’s invention; articles, books, and brochures on the subject followed. In 1858 came the first journal of photography.¹⁷⁴

Sergei Levitsky (1819-98) was the first important Russian photographer to have left his work to posterity. While studying law at Moscow University, he developed an interest in chemistry, physics, and amateur photography, and obtained a camera from Grekov. Visiting Rome in 1845, he shot a group portrait of the Russian art colony. After spending four years in Paris, Levitsky returned to St. Petersburg and in 1849 opened a professional portrait studio. His work was so proficient that he garnered several international awards. In the 1850s, Levitsky’s subjects included Pauline Viardot, Lev Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Glinka. The young Tolstoy poses in a Crimean War military uniform, his torso and gaze facing left. The photo of Turgenev, also in 1856, faces the other way and is much less flattering. Vladimir Stasov, despite his strong reservations about the medium, persuaded Mikhail Glinka to sit for Levitsky right before his last trip to Europe where he died. The composer stands before us in a Napoleonic posture, hand tucked in coat. Levitsky also attended an 1856 gathering of writers from all over Russia and took a group portrait of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, Grigorovich, and Druzhinin. Embracing a wide political gamut, he photographed Herzen and Bakunin as well as ceremonial events of Tsar Alexander II.¹⁷⁵

The popularity of portraiture grew with the opening of new studios, the shortening of exposure time, and greater accuracy in the likeness. Early works followed the traditions of the miniature oil portrait in posing and composition and soon superseded it. Like painters, photographers sought solutions to problems of pose, grouping, color, light, props, background, angles, space, and tonal nuance. Levitsky’s studio, a glass pavilion with top and side lighting, drapes and wallpaper, had a table full of knick-knacks. Clients often brought their own chairs and other accessories to create a home-like backdrop. The three-quarter-face pose, slightly off center, with diagonals for dynamic effect, became standard. The hands, which seemed to glow excessively in early photos, were hidden. Some masters used color for the background, others tinted the entire print, and many held to painterly conventions for a long time. Tinting was often overdone. In black-and-white studies, clothing presented problems. Dark suits made a glaring contrast with a white background and the best cameramen sought to develop a smooth tonal transition between them. The drabness and uniformity of costumes that men in particular began wearing from the 1840s onward inhibited poetic effect. The doublets, ruffs, and powdered wigs of the deeper past were long gone, and the more recent flamboyance of revolutionary, Restoration, and romantic trappings gave way to variations on the plain black London frock coat with cravat. The male sartorial world had turned monochrome. Even painters were hard put to enliven the post-1850 men’s portrait.¹⁷⁶

Partly for those reasons, the quality of early photo portraits seemed to offer little threat to painters. Unlike the brush, the camera could not overcome stiffness and gracelessness of some subjects even when it tried to replicate the conventions of the canvas. The gap between purpose and outcome may have stripped such sitters of status for the viewer. A shot of P. D. Durnovo in the 1850s shows an exceptionally rigid stance, with feet together, cane and railing tightly gripped, a grim facial expression, and dull apparel. Dautendei’s 1848 photo of the historian Timofei Granovsky and Levitsky’s of the poet Fëdor Tyutchev are hardly more appealing. A tinted 1859 portrait of a stiff and awkward N. F. Shcherbina is not saved by his wide-awake hat and cape.¹⁷⁷ Female subjects did not fare much better under the camera’s eye. 1850s portraits come across as perfectly uninteresting human triangles due to the shape of gowns then in fashion. K. A. Bergner’s group study of the mother of Savva Mamontov with two daughters (1850s) comes out as three triangles within a triangle. Color rarely helped. In the same decade, an unknown photographer produced a jarring and grotesquely realistic tinted photo of a very solemn young woman standing against a brightly colored theatrical backdrop of ruins and vines, a pathetic attempt to conflate the sensibilities of two different eras at the moment of their divergence.¹⁷⁸

Sometimes the old arty poses worked well, as in the case of the photograph of M. S. Volkonsky, son of the Decembrist, at the end of 1850s; and in that of the opera singer Enrico Tamberlink, who had the advantage of stage costume and theatrical gesturing. The portrait of the Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov in 1844 succeeds also largely because of the outlandish murmolka and armyak that he liked to wear, garments of mixed ethnic origin. Levitsky’s widely reproduced study of the Westernizer Alexander Herzen, done in London in 1861, overcomes the dullness of costume and beard and captures the remnants of a romantic youth by posing the subject in a strong diagonal lean, with head on hand and legs crossed.¹⁷⁹ A portrait of the ten-year-old Vladimir Ershov of 1855 or 1856 evokes, in the dignity and self-confidence of his pose, the budding of a future Guards officer and aide to the tsar. In the 1850s, the photographer Bergner overcame the usual awkwardness of family groupings by posing two small children with toys on a kind of banister rail beside their young mother. The purchasing public—gentry and merchants—apparently unaffected by degrees of artistic success, flocked to the studios, the merchants moving up a social notch as some had done when they sat for oil portraits. Though photographic portraits were cheaper than those in oil, the lower classes remained largely out of the portrait studios. The sole exception I have found, by an anonymous photographer, features two working-class brothers, fireplace installers, solemnly facing the camera (fig. 64). This tinted daguerreotype, made in Moscow around 1852, is probably the first ever posed photograph of individual workers.¹⁸⁰

Few of the rare early photographs of Russian genre scenes have survived. One gritty shot by a foreigner, Roger Fenton, in 1852 includes a Moscow tavern. Revealing how remote from real appearances were even the most naturalistic genre pictures of this era, the dark and misty image of a squat and nondescript tavern, a cart, a stone step, and a lunette above the door is depressing in its very ordinariness. The Russian Academy-trained V. A. Karrick (William Carrick, b. 1827 or 1830) photographed scenes of everyday life and of popular street types in Petersburg, Novgorod, the Volga, and the central provinces. A surviving 1862 Carrick photo shows peasants at the Kamenka Fair near Simbirsk wearing cylinder hats and carrying water buckets. The drab and soiled garments of Carrick’s street figures in the early 1860s give a harsher and more direct look at reality than the most unflattering renditions of the critical and accusatory artists of the same period.¹⁸¹ Landscape and genre held few charms for commercial photographers because it yielded little profit and required hauling expensive and heavy equipment.

However, Russian and foreign photographers did journey to the interior on government business or to satisfy their curiosity. Although there was as yet no thoroughgoing enterprise compared to the photographing of British India, for example,¹⁸² separate expeditions were launched to capture Russia with light and lens. As early as 1843 Levitsky took camera and plates on a government assignment to examine mineral water sites in the Caucasus. He and the scientist Yu. F. Fritsche, who was using photography for research, shot topographical sites and towns, but none of their plates has survived. In the 1850s when the collodion process introduced the use of paper for better images, photography made further headway among amateurs, journalists, scientists, and ethnographers. This led the Imperial Geographical Society to use the medium in an ethnographic study of Voronezh Province. The Swede Karl Mazer, who maintained a large studio in Moscow, sailed down the Volga with his apparatus to Nizhny Novgorod and Astrakhan, taking pictures along the way. The Frenchman Alfred d’Avignon journeyed with his camera in the early 1840s to Tver, Novgorod, Vladimir, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Ekaterinburg, Tobolsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and even to remote Kiakhta near the Chinese border. In addition to recording the Siberian lands with his camera, d’Avignon took pictures of the exiled Decembrists Volkonsky, A. V. Poggio, and N. A. Panov. Reported to the police and arrested, d’Avignon then dropped out of sight and most of his pictures of the Decembrists were destroyed. Volkonsky’s, one that survived, now hangs in the Historical Museum in Moscow. One Decembrist exile, N. A. Bestuzhev, living in the Trans-Baikal region of Siberia, took up photography as an amateur hobby in the 1850s.¹⁸³

Photography was well in place when the Crimean War broke out in 1853 making that conflict the first ever covered by photoreportage. Cameramen from the major belligerents arrived on the peninsula along with journalists, including the young Tolstoy, to record the fortunes and misfortunes of war. The more realistic English and French works caught harrowing views of the gutted buildings and torn-up streets of Sevastopol after the city was captured. Images taken after the battles at Balaklava and the Black River show a tormented landscape of burned and twisted trees, already foreshadowing the grimness of World War I. The Russian pictures are less harsh, and they feature many a figure study in the parade portrait tradition of officers in heroic and pompous poses.¹⁸⁴

While clients were ordering portrait photographs in the burgeoning salons all over Europe, the art world looked on, sometimes in dismay. “This is the end of art,” said J. M. W. Turner on seeing his first daguerreotype. “I am glad I have had my day."¹⁸⁵ The poet Charles Baudelaire had this to say twenty years after the invention of the new process: ”I am convinced that the badly applied advances of photography, like all purely material progress for that matter, have greatly contributed to the impoverishment of French artistic genius.''¹⁸⁶ American commentators wondered whether the new device was an art, a “factual document,” a record, or an idealization. The painter Thomas Cole dismissed it completely, while another American claimed that photography had “swept away many of the illiberal distinctions of rank and wealth.” Samuel Morse and hundreds of others deserted painting for it.¹⁸⁷

In Russia, scientific discussions of the uses of photography were soon joined by a debate about the arts. A theater critic in 1849 used the term “daguerreotype of nature” in a flattering way to describe Shchepkin’s acting. The journal Photography argued—in tones taken sixty years later by Lenin about cinema—that photography was the most influential of all the arts because it could reach so many people. Other voices dissented. The conservative journalist Osip Senkovsky, after seeing an Academy of Arts exhibit in 1840 of three plates dedicated to Nicholas I, declared that Daguerre was a charlatan. The St. Petersburg Art Gazette wrote that, though photography was useful to science, it had no relevance to art, especially to portraiture. “Talent,” wrote a critic, “is better at painting pictures than sunlight.” In some of the literary criticism aimed at “naturalism,” the word “daguerreotype” was used as insult. Vladimir Stasov called the new medium “a cold, if also believable, summary of facts.” Stasov qualified his comment. He worried that photography posed a threat to the far superior and far more genuine art of engraving and suggested that, had it appeared earlier it might have overshadowed engraving altogether. But photography, he wrote, did not embody ideas; it simply copied coldly as opposed to engraving which had warmth and life. “The world of art lies distant and unattainable to [photography] and it should not lay claim to it.” Yet in 1858 he raised photography to a major element in the art world and predicted great results.¹⁸⁸

Practicing artists responded in various ways. Some felt alarm at the menacing eye of the camera and were intimidated by the apparent verisimilitude of its products. Others were so enchanted by it that, like artists elsewhere, they gave up conventional art and embraced the black box. Many of these were graduates of the Academy, where painterly realism was rare. Andrei Karelin (b. 1837), the illegitimate son of a state peasant mother, attended an icon-painting school in Tambov and then the Academy from 1857. He became a photographer, as did Taras Shevchenko’s friend from the Academy, Ivan Hudovsky. Lavr Plakhov, a first-class graduate of the Academy, saw a daguerreotype in Paris, stopped painting, and took his camera to the towns of Ukraine. Carrick studied architecture at the Academy before turning to photography. Kramskoi’s classmates from Voronezh, M. B. Tulinov and M. I. Ponomarëv, did likewise. Andrei Denier (1820-92) audited Academy courses, opened a photo studio in the Passage on Nevsky Prospect, and brought his art training with him to the new venture. More than that, Denier converted some of his professors to at least a tolerance of the camera. In 1860-61, photographs were exhibited side by side with paintings. Denier made photo portraits of several professors, including that arch-academician Fëdor Bruni whom he persuaded to serve as judge at photographic exhibits. Along the way, Denier did portraits of the Itinerant painters Ilya Repin, Ivan Kramskoi, and Ivan Shishkin, and of the literary figures Nikolai Nekrasov, Turgenev, and Tyutchev. Shevchenko’s famous photo in furs, done on his return from exile in the late 1850s, is the work of Denier.¹⁸⁹

More subtle and in the long run more important than these cases of career change was photography’s impact on those who remained artists. Though few were unaffected, Sergei Zaryanko and Kramskoi best illustrate the diversity of that impact. Zaryanko, the erstwhile disciple of Venetsianov who taught Vasily Perov among others at the Moscow School of Painting, took the more literal side of the master’s teaching and, helped by the camera, took painterly “realism” to absurd lengths. As a painter and teacher who envisioned the artist’s job as nothing less than exact reproduction, he saw the photographic image with dual vision: on the one hand, he claimed that it distorted reality; on the other, he proclaimed photography to be an auxiliary science and a useful aid to drawing. Perov said rightly that his master’s work sometimes looked just like a photo. Zaryanko’s three 1850s portraits hanging side by side in the Russian Museum can hardly be differentiated from tinted photographs. The Rostovtsev Family in particular displays photographic details in each of its parts, but is composed like a painting and is thus not only unrealistic but a failure as a work of art.¹⁹⁰ It was in fact the on-canvas equivalent of the grotesque tinted photograph of the young woman noted above. Zaryanko, though his influence on other artists was strong, had himself been led into an aesthetic dead end by the camera. The future great Itinerant painter, Ivan Kramskoi (1837-87), took an opposite course, starting with photography and ending in art. As a youth in Ostrogozhsk in Voronezh Province, he apprenticed to traveling photographers, wandering from town to town on contract. One of them, Yakov Danilevsky, a converted Jew, had been a watchmaker and photographer in Kharkov. Arriving in Ostrogozhsk in the summer of 1853 as dragoon regiments were gathering for the Crimean War, Danilevsky opened a portrait studio and Kramskoi retouched the photos of officers and soldiers. When Kramskoi went on the road with Danilevsky, his mother objected to his working for a Jew, even a converted one. Kramskoi, who traveled with Danilevsky for a few years, thought little better of his boss whom he described as lacking artistic taste and, in clichéd anti-Semitic terms, as having “the character of a Jew [zhid].” After moving to St. Petersburg Kramskoi gained a reputation as the “god of retouching,” working for Denier. Kramskoi continued retouching during his studies at the Academy of Arts in the 1860s. He even planned a photography studio in the 1860s. Instead, he used his encounter with photography as a springboard to a style and a movement that changed Russian art (chapter 9).¹⁹¹

By the 1840s at least, the Russian educated public was athirst for knowledge, stories, and pictures of their vast country. The leading journal of the 1840s, the Petersburg Contemporary, in its reviews of Academy exhibits, echoed Moscow Governor Senyavin and the Slavophile Khomyakov in urging painters to uncover the diverse riches of Russia.¹⁹² Exploring the interior was not simply a matter of finding and representing new worlds. The slow shift in visualizing also brought about self-discovery. On the social level, it signaled new structures of value and self-worth. Landscapes and cityscapes became increasingly populated with real Russian people of various social backgrounds. The privileged classes remained in view, but were more and more often captured in intimate portraits and family scenes. Even the realia of interiors could produce revelation. When Venetsianov instructed his pupils to gaze carefully at the most trivial objects of an interior, it meant that ordinary things were as worthy of reproduction as the opulent props of ceremonial portraits and interiors. This probably reinforced the notion that ordinary people were equally worthy of representation. And since representation had been linked in the academic discourse to dignity and freedom, then the leap to the idea of general liberation may have taken root among artists as well. The natural process—no sudden revolt—of change in cognition brought into public view identities that had previously been obscured; and it led to a search for novel social types. Artists increasingly turned away from classical concerns to the here and now: from the outside to the inside, from the past to the present, from the high to the low. In one sense, the constant expansion of the artists’ spatial focus—both in form and in social content—was joined to a constriction of space in generic subject matter. Of the principal modes of the artistic relationship to life, aside from self-expression—to exalt, to show, to critique—Russian art had reached the second function by the 1850s. Given the social, political, and intellectual climate of that decade, it took no great leap to reach the third mode.