Aiwasowsky, the virtuoso of the troubled sea, is more effective than the
quiet Schischkin. His storms at sea, with their transparent waves,
actually drive terror into the onlooker. The Black Sea has been the
favorite object of his pictures. There all the furies seem to be let
loose in order to frighten fisher and sailor. And these floods shine and
shimmer; they are as if covered with a transparent light. Levitan,
again, has understood the charm of the calm surface of a small body of
water as no one else. His brush is dipped in feeling. The beauty of his
pictures cannot be reproduced in words. He seems to have a special
sense-organ for the shades of the atmosphere. It is a pity that he died
so very young.
The collection of Vereschtschagin has now obtained a particularly
enhanced value because of the awful death of the master. The Tretyakov
Gallery has, with the exception of the Napoleonic pictures which
ornament the Alexander Museum, almost the whole life-work of the artist.
His work has only recently been universally appreciated. The power of
the versatile man was astonishing; his philanthropic turn of mind and
his epigrammatic spirit give spice to his pictures; but of him, first of
all, perhaps, it might be said that he used his art for purposes foreign
to it in spite of all artistic treatment. For it was seldom the artistic
problem that charmed him. Only his Oriental color studies are to a
certain extent free from ulterior purposes.
It is difficult to choose from this abundance of good masters, and
particularly to name those whom one should know above the others.
Pictures cannot easily be made so accessible as books, and the contents
of a picture does not permit of being told at all. And so I content
myself with mentioning again the names of Ryepin, Schischkin, Levitan,
and Aiwasowsky, and then those of the portrait-painter Kramskoi, the
landscape-painter Gay, and the master of genre painting, Makowski. And
to any one whose path ever leads him to Moscow, a visit to the Tretyakov
Gallery is most urgently recommended. A people which produces such
artists in every field as the Russian has not only the right to the
strongest self-consciousness, and to the general sympathy of people of
culture, but, above all, it has the right to be respected by its rulers
and not to be handled like a horde of slaves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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