How a naval officer became an artist and why he ended his life with a shot in the heart: Alexander Beggrov

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

History remembers many cases when they became artists already in adulthood. What is called at the call of the heart or because of the revealed talent, or even in order to fulfill your childhood dream. We will talk about such an artist today. Meet , Beggrov Alexander Karlovich - a naval officer, an outstanding Russian marine painter, itinerant, one of the greatest masters of the seascape of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries.

Alexander Karlovich went down in the history of Russian painting as a watercolorist, academician and honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Arts, a member of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions, who continued the academic traditions of the landscape genre in his work.

Life path from naval officer to artist

Alexander Beggrov (1841-1914) was born in St. Petersburg in the family of the famous St. Petersburg watercolorist and lithographer Karl Joachim Beggrov, academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. The boy's gift for drawing manifested itself in early childhood. And how could he not manifest when he lived and was brought up in a creative environment. However, when he grew up, the father disposed of the future of his son at his own discretion. Despite Alexander's resistance, his father sent the young man to the Nikolaev Engineering and Artillery School of the Naval Ministry.

At the age of 18, during the naval parade dedicated to the opening of the monument to Emperor Nicholas I, Alexander's first acquaintance with the fleet took place. What he saw impressed the guy so much that he made several sketches on paper. These drawings caught the eye of officials from the War Department and made a good impression on them. This will play a significant role in Beggrov's career in the future.

Three years later, he was promoted to an officer, and in 1863, with the rank of warrant officer of the Corps of Mechanical Engineers, he entered the service of the Imperial Baltic Fleet and set off on a long voyage. Having sailed from the shores of the Baltic on the battleship "Oslyabya", he returned back on the frigate "Alexander Nevsky". True, on the way home in 1868, "Alexander Nevsky" crashed off the coast of Denmark. The ship sank to the bottom, but most of the crew were saved. The future artist was also among those saved.

Thanks to this disaster, the fateful meeting of Alexander Beggrov with the famous seascape painter Alexei Bogolyubov took place, who used sketches and sketches of the young officer to write his canvases dedicated to the tragic shipwreck of Alexander Nevsky. It was he who then prompted the young man - "not to bury your talent in the ground."

Having gone ashore, Alexander Beggrov was in charge of a drawing workshop in the Admiralty of St. Petersburg for a couple of years. And from 1870 to 1873, as an auditor, the 30-year-old officer began attending the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, where he studied in the landscape class of Professor Mikhail Klodt. Beggrov's mentor at the Academy was also a former acquaintance - Alexei Bogolyubov.

However, already in 1871, the aspiring artist was forced to interrupt painting at the academy. He was honored to accompany the Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich on a voyage around the world on the propeller-driven frigate Svetlana. This journey allowed the artist to create many talented works, for which in 1873 he was awarded the Small Silver Medal of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

In 1874, Alexander Karlovich Beggrov retired and went to Paris, where he continued his studies with the famous French artist Léon Joseph Florentin Bonn. And it was there, in the capital of France, that he met a group of Russian Itinerant artists: with Ilya Repin, Konstantin Savitsky, and others. Over time, imbued with the ideas of itinerant movement, Alexander Karlovich began to regularly participate in exhibitions of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions. And starting in 1876, he became a full member of this Association.

An interesting fact: Beggrov took part in the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873, in Paris in 1878 and 1900, and for the painting "View of the Neva and the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island from the Stock Exchange" he was awarded the highest award at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1878.

In 1878, Alexander Beggrov was appointed by the highest decree as an artist of the Naval Ministry and remained in this position until the end of his life. Soon the painter became one of the founders of the Society of Russian Watercolors. And in 1899, the artist was awarded the title of academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts, in 1912, Alexander Karlovich was awarded the title of an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

As a retired officer, he painted mainly seascapes, in which he depicted ships and squadrons. He knew maritime combat equipment perfectly. Masts, yards, sails, all the smallest details of steam ships were familiar to him. Often, criticizing the paintings of his colleagues, where the slightest inaccuracies in the image of sea vessels were made, he grumbled:

He also masterfully handled drawing and watercolors, depicting cityscapes that clearly showed good composition, perspective, and a sense of rhythm. However, critics have often written that some of Beggrov's works are purely illustrative, and that the artist's conditional skill is stencil, thanks to the memorized writing style developed over the years.

If a person is talented, he is talented in everything

Alexander Beggrov had an incredibly strict, assertive and grumpy character. The face is always stern, and if when he laughs for a second, then even then the expression on his face did not change, as if the laughter did not come from him. He was incredibly inventive, and if he really thought about anything, he would definitely bring it to its logical conclusion.

In 1892, the artist and his wife settled in Gatchina, near St. Petersburg, where they bought a plot on a vacant lot, built a house on it and planted a small garden. Starting to arrange his land, he brought chips and manure from everywhere to fertilize the soil. He spread a wonderful berry: raspberries, gooseberries, currants, strawberries. Moreover, the varieties were unusual: in terms of size and taste, no one else in the district had such berries. Moreover, he ordered extraordinary standard roses, which he jealously protected from frost in winter, and in summer the inhabitants of Gatchina came to admire them in the wonderful Beggrov's garden, which also managed to grow the earliest vegetables in the room and greenhouses, competing with those brought from the southern regions …

He was a superb cook. Often he invited friends to his house and treated them to such a dinner that even the best chef could not prepare. When guests arrived, the owner of the house suggested that they do something in his absence - look at albums, paintings, read the press, and he himself went to the kitchen, put on an apron and started cooking. When everyone was seated at the table, he brought soup, opened the lid of the soup bowl and stood silently, waiting for the reaction of the guests.

The single aroma of the soup, seasoned with various roots and seasonings, delighted them. The guests barely refrained not to ask for more, because they knew that an even greater miracle of culinary art awaited them. Indeed, the owner brought out the second course under a large cap, forcing those sitting at the table to freeze in admiration only from its sight and smell. The meal was interspersed with good wine, which Beggrov had expertly selected. After dinner, Alexander Karlovich led the guests into the garden and treated them to extraordinary berries from his garden.

In the artist's home, food was brought to the highest degree of art without quantitative excesses.

Alexander Karlovich also bred a poultry house in his farm, in which he kept extraordinary chickens, which were very neat, rushed at a strictly defined time, fulfilling their duties with precision. The spiteful critics assured him that he allegedly changed roosters many times until he found one that fully met his purpose.

And, curiously, everything that Alexander Karlovich did and used in his household was not taken from books or any other manuals, but invented by him and guessed by the subtle instinct of the inventor with verification on his own experience. In all the little things, he showed a hard, like flint, character. And if it really rests on something, even a trifle, you can't move it for anything.

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However, overnight everything collapsed in the artist's life: his wife died, and his hands were completely discouraged. He abandoned his wonderful garden, poultry farm. Later he sold the house and rented an apartment.

He received some money from the sale of the house. Together with the previous savings, it gave the artist the opportunity to exist unnecessarily. But life without any activity was absolutely not a joy to him. Painting? But if before she did not fill it entirely, or rather, was not the content of his whole life, now he has completely cooled down to her and did not write anything for exhibitions, even grunted angrily when asked what he was writing. The artist barely finished his last work by the 1912 exhibition and did not take up a brush again. In the same year, Beggrov donated 63,900 rubles to the Imperial Academy of Arts to help "poor artists, their widows and orphans."

For the last year and a half, the artist has been seriously ill. He steadfastly endured severe pains, but, not wanting to succumb to weakness, he endured in silence, without complaining of torment. And when it became completely unbearable to live, Alexander Beggrov on the night of April 14-15, 1914, exhausted to the edge, committed suicide with a shot from a revolver in the heart. He was buried in the city cemetery next to his wife Lucia Beggrova. So, alas, the life of a talented person was tragically cut short.

Continuing the theme of artists who came to art late, read our publication: As a descendant of gold miners and a provincial lawyer, he became an academician of painting: Vladimir Kazantsev.