Vasily Perov

"... What a talent! What an imposing, independent figure! What a marvelous choice of subjects! What an eye and a talent for observation! Such a rich gallery of types this original Siberian has brought into our art" ( V. V. Stasov).

Vasily Grigoryevich Perov is one of the most predominating figures in Russian painting of the 1860s. He lived at a time when an artist’s indifference to social problems was considered immoral in Russia. And it was Perov who took up a vital and most complicated task of establishing the principles of critical realism. His pictures carried strong social implication and thus became an important landmark in the history of Russian painting.

Vasily Perov was an illegitimate son of the baron G. K. Kridiner, an Arzamas prosecutor. In 1846, he entered the Art School of Stupin in Arzamas, where he got his nickname of Perov (from Russian pero, pen) for his good handwriting. Since 1853 till 1861, Perov studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. He studied intermittently at Arzamas from 1846 to 1849 at the Art School of Alexander Stupin (1776–1862), a classicist painter whose School was the first of its type in provincial Russia, and during the 1850s at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under Sergey Zaryanko. The work of Pavel Fedotov, pictorial satire in the press and genre scenes by the Old Dutch masters and William Hogarth were the greatest formative influences on Perov. His early works, permeated by a Biedermeier romantic spirit, combine detailed brushwork with anecdotal narrative and aim at criticizing social behaviour in line with the contemporary democratic doctrines of such writers as Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Such anti-clerical pictures as the Sermon in a Village are distinguished by a particular irony. As in the prose of Nikolay Leskov, which has many affinities with Perov’s painting, there is a conflict between feelings of love and hatred, and between an intimate knowledge of the daily life of the people and an alienating irony.

For his Sermon in a Village, painted as a diploma work in 1861, the St. Petersburg Academy awarded Perov the Grand Gold medal and subsidized his trip abroad. For his foreign studies Perov chose France. In Paris, Perov, in his own words, ‘made a considerable progress in the technique of painting’ though he did not create anything truly significant there, and even before his stipendiary period had been over, Perov returned to Russia

Perov returned to Moscow in 1864, where he headed a group of young artists-realists and became a founding member of and an active figure in the Circle of the Itinerants. In 1866 he received the title of member of the Petersburg Academy of Arts. A leading painter of genre scenes and portraits in the 1860s and 1870s, Perov exercised an enormous influence on the development of Russian realism in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Perov’s success as a genre painter reached its peak in the latter half of the 1860s. His compositions become more laconic and expressive; overcoming an indisciplined use of colour, he achieved an impressive unity with an austere greyish-brown palette. Such works as the Found Drowned and the Last Tavern at Town Gate are analogous to the prose of Fyodor Dostoyevsky in their depiction of the lowest strata of urban life. In 1865, a year after he had returned from Paris, Perov completed the Last Journey, a painting with an intentionally uncomplicated subject matter clear to all and sundry.

The Troika, Perov’s most expressive work produced in 1866, is especially typical of his style. Perov’s style reached maturity in the Last Tavern at Town Gate (1868). More generally, the same holds for Russian realistic art with its focus on the conjunction of social predilection and artistic completeness. In the 1870s, Perov made some historical paintings. He produced Pugachev’s Judgment (1870) and Nikita Pustosviat. Dispute on the Confession of Faith (1880). At the same time, he was still prolific in the genre, which is exemplified by his elegiac Old Parents Visiting the Grave of Their Son (1874), widely famous The hunters on a halt (1871), monumental Peasant in the Field (1876), sorrowful and disturbing Peasants Returning from a Funeral in Winter (1880?), and the Pigeon Fancier (1874). But having come a long way from the Easter Procession in a Village to the Found Drowned and the Last Tavern at Town Gate, Perov had paid his tribute to the genre: its further development towards the truly national painting was to be connected with the name of Ilya Repin.

In 1871, Perov, together with Ivan Kramskoy, Nikolay Gay, and Grigory Myasoedov became a founder of the Itinerants’ Society of Traveling Exhibitions (the Peredvizhniki). Also in 1871, Perov became a professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, he turned out to be an excellent teacher; among his students were such outstanding Russian painters as Sergey (?) Korovin, Andrey Riabushkin, Nikolai Kasatkin, Mikhail Nesterov and others.

At the end of the 1860s, Perov turned to portraiture in which he was equally pioneering. Exploring life, he discovered a variety of interesting characters and was able to convey their graphic individuality and profundity, e.g. Thomas the Owl (1868) or Wanderer (1870). These paintings were the beginning of a whole gallery of peasant portraits increased later by Kramskoy, Repin, and Maximov.

In the 1870s, Perov created a series of portraits of the Russian people of culture. Only an artist who fully understood the task and responsibility of portraiture could have achieved this characterization, passionate and devoid of everything vain and contingent. So, in the portraits of Anton Rubinshtein (1870), Alexander Ostrovsky (1871), Feodor Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Dahl, Mikhail Pogodin, and Apollon Maikov (1872) we see a brilliant combination of a faithful and, at the same time, critical rendering and a profound delineation of character.