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Картины Федора
Васильева
Оттепель,
1871
Болото в лесу.
Осень,
1871-1873
Мокрый луг,
1872
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Fedor Vasilyev in English
The works of the wonderfully gifted landscape painter Fedor Vasilyev, who died very young, occupy a position of the first importance in the Russian art of the second half of the nineteenth century.
Vasilyev was born in 1850 in the small town of Gatchina near St. Petersburg, the son of a petty postal clerk. Soon after his birth the family moved to St. Petersburg, the then capital of Russia. Vasilyev's precocious talent displayed itself very early and led him to the decision to become a painter. In spite of extremely strained circumstances, at the age of thirteen, he enrolled in the evening art class sponsored by the Society for the Promotion of Artists. At the same time, he was articled at the restorer of the Academy of Arts to be of some help to his mother. After his father's untimely death, he became the sole supporter of the family. The responsibility he had to take upon him developed in the lad indomitable tenacity and an acute sense of duty and morale - the principles that, according to Vasilyev, where the basis of his strife for perfection in art. «Vasilyev is becoming what he should be, what Nature itself has destined him to be (I mean, certainly, the moral aspect of it); he is becoming what he promised to become,» Vasilyev wrote about himself to the painter Kramskoy on March 14, 1873 in connection with his painting In the Mountains of the Crimea made for a contest.
Such an exceptional talent required perfection, but the artist's hard life barred its progress denying Vasilyev the opportunity of a necessary technical training. Shortly before his death, in a letter to the famous collector Pavel Tretyakov, he made a bitter confession summing up his life as an artist: «I paint every picture with my blood and sweat rather than colours; every picture gives me nothing but pains. It is because I am fully, almost tangibly aware of the drawbacks of my pictures and realize, quite as clearly, what must be done, yet I cannot do what I could do, since the circumstances have not, so far, allowed me to be the master of my work and time.»
The more surprising therefore is how powerful and comprehensive were his achievements. Both the subject matter, always novel and original, and its audacious handling in the paintings, drawings, and sepias reflect the intensive progress of his talent. Of the six years of his artistic endeavour, three were spent in struggle with a severe ailment that proved fatal for the artist. But in these three years his most impressive works were created.
In 1867 Vasilyev graduated from the art class and, for some time, became Ivan Shishkin's disciple. In the summer of 1867 they together went to the isle of Valaam on Ladoga Lake. There Vasilyev, under Shishkin's tutelage, began to draw from nature. Shishkin's idiosyncratic technique and mastery of drawing were for Vasilyev another school of art indispensable for his future accomplishments. In spite of the deepest respect to his teacher, Vasilyev, even in the beginning of his artistic career, was able to show his originality, which is manifest already in his Valaam drawings. This first experience required more complicated and more generalized graphic techniques than those of Shishkin, which were based on rendering minute detail. The difference in style reflected differences, both broad and deep, between the two personalities.
In the next year, however, Vasilyev found himself working side by side with Shishkin; it was, probably, under Shishkin's influence that he began to turn to painting. To overcome the dependence upon Shishkin's style with its strong flavour of tradition, Vasilyev tried to rely on nineteenth century German and French landscape painters. For some time, it was the Barbizon school that attracted him most of all. Although Vasilyev found support and inspiration in the works of Western European painters, especially those who depicted scenes of every-day rustic life, it never came to direct borrowing of themes, motifs or techniques: his intuition told him what was best and most concordant with the nature of his talent. As a result, Vasilyev's paintings acquired a melody, characteristically his own. This can be seen in Vasilyev's early picture Near a Watering Place (1868) similar, but only slightly, to the landscapes of the Barbizon school; the difference is much more prominent in the stormy scenes produced both in his earlier and later periods. Probably the stormy scenes of the Barbizon painters attracted Vasilyev by a romantic air about them. But acquaintance with the manner of Dupre, Troyon, or Diaz revealed to him the principles of the school as a whole rather than those of individual painters; it affected his art but never resulted in a non-creative borrowing of the motifs. Though, at first, Vasilyev was somewhat inferior technically to the Barbizon painters, he eventually found his own way of handling the subject and the Volga Lagoons and After a Rain. Country Road exceed, in many respects, the Barbizon stormy scenes in their expressiveness and a deeply national sound.
Vasilyev spent the summer of 1869 in Count Stroganov's estate Znamenskoye-Karyan (Tambov Province), where he produced a variety of small paintings, as original and daring. Vasilyev painted these pictures under the enchanting impression of the first encounter with the steppe, that brought the young artist into a state of wonderful romantic exaltation. This emotion gave birth to a creative impulse increased by a romantic dream of an ideal unity of man and nature. It was probably similar to what Russian painters felt when, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, they saw the wonderful scenery under the cloudless sky of Italy. Similar aesthetic principles, however, were differently realized at different times, and Vasilyev's Evening (1869), After a Rain (1869), Forest Road, and Road through a Birchwood were as typical a mark of his time as, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, were pictures by Silvestr Shchedrin or Mikhail Lebedev. Vasilyev benefited both spiritually and technically from being in close contact with nature. This experience proved conductive of his later endeavours and manifested itself in the Volga landscapes.
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