Why did they forget the "luminary of the Russian landscape" Orlovsky, who shared fame with Aivazovsky

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

Nowadays, the names of some renowned academicians and professors of the Imperial Academy of Arts say little to the modern viewer. Meanwhile, at one time they competed in popularity even with the Itinerants. Among these, now almost forgotten painters, and included Vladimir Orlovsky - "the leading figure of the Russian landscape" … The publication presents a gallery of lyrical and romantic landscapes of the master, who at one time wrote many works for the aristocracy of Moscow, Petersburg, Kiev, for the royal court of Alexander III. His fame and popularity in that era was equated to the popularity of Ivan Aivazovsky himself, and his paintings were put on a par with the canvases of Arkhip Kuindzhi.

The second half of the 19th century became a golden age for Russian landscape painting, which gave the world a whole constellation of names of the greatest Itinerant masters who contributed to the creation of a school of national landscape in Russia. But at the same time there was an academic school based on the tradition of classicism with its unshakable canons and mandatory rules for constructing images. And this school was represented by no less talented artists, whose names were pushed into the background by the history of art.

A prominent representative of this school was Vladimir Donatovich Orlovsky (1842-1914) - an outstanding Russian-Ukrainian painter-landscape painter, whose works were characterized by landscapes painted in the best traditions of the academic school of painting of the 19th century.

Vladimir Orlovsky was born in 1842 into the family of a wealthy Kiev landowner. In his youth, he became interested in drawing and copying pictures. The talented works of Vladimir were noticed by I. M. Soshenko, who gave a start in life to the Kiev boy. At the beginning of 1861, the future landscape painter came to St. Petersburg with a firm decision to enter the Academy of Arts, having with him letters of recommendation to his fellow countryman Taras Shevchenko.

And, since the admission to the Academy had already been completed, the famous Ukrainian poet and artist decided to help the talented young man by personally giving him painting lessons. However, a few months later, Orlovsky's great compatriot died, having managed, a few days before his death, to recommend his student to M. F. Lvov, the conference secretary of the Imperial Academy of Arts. And he, having familiarized himself with the works of Vladimir Orlovsky, helped him to be admitted to the university without exams.

Orlovsky's training at the Academy, where he became a student of A. P. Bogolyubov, was so successful that already in 1863 he received a large silver medal. During his studies, the talented student wrote many sketches and paintings dedicated to the Crimea, Kiev province, the Caucasus, Karelia and Finland. It was for the Crimean views that the young artist received a large gold medal (1867) and the right to travel abroad for an internship at public expense.

In 1868, after graduating from the Academy of Arts with the title of a first-class artist, Orlovsky went to Europe for three years "as a pensioner from the Academy." He lived and worked in Paris, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, where he was fascinated not only by the masterpieces of world art, but also by the innovative ideas of the Impressionists, who had just begun to speak their weighty word in the history of European painting.

But, returning to St. Petersburg, Orlovsky continued to work in his own artistic manner and in the best academic traditions, wholly focusing on the tastes of eminent customers. He wrote a lot for the aristocratic salons of Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev, for the exemplary museum of the Petersburg Academy of Arts, for country houses and for the capital's palaces of the imperial family. His panoramic romantic landscapes often did not even reach exhibitions, they were bought right in the workshop.

Orlovsky was accompanied by constant success, fame, demand and material wealth. He was declared "an artist of the first magnitude, standing on a par with Aivazovsky", as well as "an artist who stands at the head of the new real direction of Russian landscape painting."

In 1874 the painter was awarded the title of academician, and in 1878 - professor for the painting "Haymaking". He was also elected a Member of the Academy Council, took part in the activities of the Kiev drawing school of N. I. Murashko, in the organization of the Kiev art school; taught at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.

In 1897, the artist fell ill with typhoid fever, and on the advice of doctors, after recovering, he moved from the northern capital to Kiev. However, in order to maintain undermined health, Vladimir Orlovsky had to spend the rest of his life away from his homeland. For more than a decade he lived in sunny Genoa (Italy), where he died in 1914. The artist was buried, as he bequeathed, in Kiev.

About creativity

The paintings of Vladimir Donatovich, as you probably already noted, are very diverse in their natural landscape with respect to geography: from Karelia and St. Petersburg to the Crimea and the Caucasus. They are also diverse in terms of the content of the atmospheric environment and nature in general: cloudy day, winter moonlit night, sunset and sunrise, autumn flood and surf, and so on. Many critics of that time noted in the work of Orlovsky the influence of the works of the famous landscape painter A. I. Kuindzhi. And there really is some truth in this.

The peak of the incredible popularity of the artist Orlovsky was in the 1880s, when, inspired, returning from Europe, he created almost all of his best works in a classical manner, seasoned with new ideas, extraordinary plot lines, and innovative motives. He introduced a fresh stream into landscape painting, which later came to be called the "new realistic art".

In his works, he skillfully used the developments of Western European artists, replacing the natural landscape and characters. So at Orlovsky we can see instead of Italian rocky shores and bays, pines and evergreen cypresses, antique Roman ruins and tanned shepherds - green hilly terrain, transparent rivers and lakes, wonderful birch groves, century-old forests, picturesque Ukrainian farms, with their inhabitants and home living creatures. Moreover, the characters on his canvases play certain roles, which sets a certain mood for a given landscape plot.

By the way, this rather successful artistic technique distinguished Vladimir Donatovich favorably from other landscape painters of that time. It was he who enjoyed incredible popularity with customers. In addition, each canvas, embodying a certain type of natural environment and its mood - from the majestic, calmly thoughtful to the menacing and mysterious - presents the viewer with the opportunity to emotionally experience the terrible element and enjoy the pacification of the world around him. Especially his customers liked seascapes with "their disturbing, deliberately agitated color and mysterious plot."

A distinctive feature of Orlovsky's artistic manner is also a spectacular panoramic view. Endless steppes, hilly terrain, mountainous distances stretching across the entire picture plane literally attract the viewer's eye and make them peer into the distance, in the haze of which one can see slender cypresses and minarets of mosques, Ukrainian farms and northern Russian villages. And against the background of this clearly arranged picturesque scenery, amusing genre scenes of the foreground unfold: women in colorful outfits, reapers in the fields, a horse and foal crossing the river, oxen grazing in the pasture. It was in this way that the master brought life into the traditional academic genre of figurative landscape.

An interesting fact: the artist often literally with two or three, almost miniature strokes inscribed in his canvases figures of women raking hay in a meadow; fishermen sitting in boats; reapers mowing grass; peasant women feeding livestock and at the same time in the foreground, where the viewer comes close to real nature with his gaze, he scrupulously painted every blade of grass, every leaf and flower.

But, no matter how realistic Orlovsky's paintings looked, the canons of academized realism did not allow the master to convey the airy depth of the painting space by replacing the color palette that was used for this by other masters, in particular the impressionists. The artist in his work only used a simple technique of whitening tones, which in no way added air to his paintings.

However, he very skillfully used warm and bright light, uniting the world in his paintings into a single harmonious whole, in which there is a place for both nature and the objective realities of everyday life, and, of course, a person who lives and works on earth …

P. S

In conclusion, I would like to note that the works of Vladimir Orlovsky have been repeatedly exhibited at the Sotheby's auction at a price of 5 thousand US dollars and almost 300 thousand US dollars. Thus, the record price for this artist at the Sotheby's London auction in 2016 was 286,971 US dollars for the painting "Gnilitsa River" (1885).

The name of the famous Ukrainian artist Nikolai Pimonenko is also forgotten today. Now, not even many can remember his famous comic stories from the life of the pre-revolutionary Ukrainian village, published on the pages of periodicals and postcards in the last century. In our publication you can see the gallery of the artist's works and read about the scandalous story of one painting, because of which the artist Pimonenko was suing the vodka manufacturer Shustov.