Boy Wonder

At the tender of age of just 13, Fyodor Vasilyev began taking classes at night to learn how to paint. Born February 22, 1850, Vasilyev felt pressure to support his family after the death of his father and hoped to take the skills he’d learned as a painting restorer and use them as a maker of pictures himself. A few years later, Russian landscape painter Ivan Shishkin fell in love with Vasilyev’s sister and soon began teaching Fyodor his secrets. Shishkin eventually introduced his young protégé to other great Russian painters of the time, including Ilya Repin, who also took Vasilyev under his wing. Before turning twenty, Vasilyev, the boy wonder of Russian painting, was creating works such as Illumination in St. Petersburg (above, from 1869). It is truly amazing just how quickly Vasilyev put into practice the lessons and advice he received. Illumination in St. Petersburg looks like something Whistler might paint if he found himself in Russia on a cold, dark night pierced by gaslight. The way the moon silhouettes the great dome in the distance like a white nimbus brings the entire picture together. The quick execution of the people bustling along the street brings to mind the Parisians of the Impressionists, just beginning to work around the same time.

Like the Impressionists, Vasilyev was influenced by the artists of the Barbizon School, such as Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet, and Théodore Rousseau. Vasilyev most likely learned of the Barbizon style through Shishkin, but once he knew the basics of the style, he quickly made it his own. Vasilyev’s Thaw (above, from 1871) unites the bleakness of earth and sky in the middle of an unforgiving Russian winter. The sky seems almost more solid than the ground, which is divided by swirling ruts that reveal the dark earth beneath the snow and give the surface as much a sense of movement as the clouds above. The great horizontals of Thaw make it seem to extend forever—as “endless” as the famous Russian winters themselves. Vasilyev takes care to derive maximum drama from every element of nature, just as Corot, Millet, and Rousseau took the Forest of Fontainebleau and squeezed every last drop of interest from it.

Vasilyev’s Wet Meadow (above, from 1872) shows how he was able to do more than winter snowscapes. The richness of detail in the foreground enhances the sense of depth as Vasilyev moves back into the picture plane and softens the focus. Again, the clouds above rival the best that the Barbizon artists have to offer. Still only 22 years old, Vasilyev seemed poised to rule over the Russian art world for decades. Sadly, after a little more than a year after painting Wet Meadow, Vasilyev was dead, a victim of tuberculosis. Vasilyev’s tuberculosis forced him to paint indoors. He painted Wet Meadow entirely from memory. Just as he was gaining fame and seeing more that Russia’s great landmass had to offer as subject matter, Vasilyev’s life and career were over. Fortunately, Vasilyev lived on in the sense of influencing the next generation of Russian landscape artists, who followed his example of taking the best of the French style and making it distinctly Russian.

War and Peace

The title of Leo Tolstoy’s greatest work, War and Peace, could stand for the entire history of Russia from its most brutal beginnings to modern-day revolutions. Ilya Repin painted much of that bloody, and often beautiful, history like no other and remains a cult figure in his native Russia even today. Born August 5, 1844 in what today is The Ukraine, Repin painted Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on Friday, November 16, 1581 (above, from 1870-1873) with an almost operatic intensity. Repin shows the brutal leader holding his son in an almost pieta-like pose after just strucking down and killing his son in a moment of blind rage. The look of anguished regret emblemizes much of Russia’s historical consciousness, which seems to inevitably alternate between moments of mindless destruction and soul-searching contemplation. Repin mined that history for many of his greatest subjects, reveling in the literature and music that reflected the depths of the Russian soul.

When Nicholas II and Alexandra Fyodorovna wed in 1894, Repin painted the official portrait of the proceedings (above, from 1894). The pomp and majesty of the Tsarist court comes alive in Repin’s work, from the elaborate dress of the religious ministers on the left to Nicolas’ military uniform and Alexandra’s endless wedding gown. Nicolas would become Tsar later that year, the last Tsar Russia would know. A decade later, when Tsar Nicolas II granted greater civil liberties to the Russian people in response to the Russian Revolution of 1905, Repin painted 17 October 1905 to commemorate the people’s joy over the first inklings of a true constitution. I can almost hear Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 in G minor (Opus 103), titled The Year 1905, playing as Repin’s crowd presses forward. Sadly, Nicolas’ reforms did little in reality, merely delaying the inevitable uprising of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which ended with the horrific death of the Russian royal family and the birth of the Soviet state.

I love Repin’s Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (above, from 1893). Repin painted several portraits of Tolstoy, but this one, in which Tolstoy literally comes in contact with the soil of his beloved homeland while simultaneously indulging in the literature he furthered, seems the most satisfying single image of the author. Repin painted so many images of horror (or preludes to horror) that Tolstoy’s idyll reminds us of the joyful moments in Russian history so often forgotten. At the end of his life, the Soviet government held Repin up as the prototypical "Socialist Realist" artist for other Russian artists to follow (if they knew what was good for them). It would have been interesting to see what Repin would have done with the events that transpired after his death in 1930—mostly the same cycle of war and peace over and over, but with new villains and new heroes to depict. Repin’s realism always captured the humanity of his people with an open eye and, most importantly, an open heart.