Celebrities of the 19th century in portraits painted by Vasily Perov for the Tretyakov Gallery

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

Many people from school are familiar with the impressive genre paintings of the famous Russian painter Vasily Perov. However, we know very little about Perov as a brilliant portraitist, who created a unique gallery of psychological portraits of famous contemporaries, to which he devoted the last decade of his life.

Vasily Perov - an outstanding portrait painter

A special place in the artistic heritage of Vasily Perov is occupied by a magnificent portrait gallery created in the 70s of the 19th century, which opens with a self-portrait dated 1870, which depicts the 37-year-old artist himself. On it, Perov did not embellish himself at all: "the skin is covered with traces of smallpox, the high forehead is wrinkled, the deep furrow between the eyebrows is especially noticeable - a sign of constant emotional anxiety." And also from the canvas "the clever, penetrating eyes of a person who has seen and experienced a lot in the life of … a person of strong will and a critical mindset" look at us.

The painter devoted more than a decade to creating a series of portraits of prominent figures of Russian culture and art - writers, poets, musicians, artists. It is worth noting that many portraits of Perov were commissioned by Pavel Tretyakov himself, who bought the lion's share of both the artist's genre works and portraits by his brush. A huge number of works by Vasily Grigorievich to this day are the property of the Tretyakov Gallery.

The artist's portraits are distinguished by subtle psychological expressiveness of images, in them he managed to convey a completely new social and psychological mood for portrait art. The painter recreated on canvas not just a person in the material aspect, but also his spiritual world: Perov asserted.

In the last years of his life, already being terminally ill, Vasily Perov from a cheerful and cheerful person turned into an irritable and suspicious old man. Unfortunately, he destroyed some of his paintings while trying to remake them. And anticipating his end, Vasily Perov returned to his most significant work - "The Wanderer", written in 1870. The artist rewrote the picture again, depicting instead of the old man hunched over under the burden of life, the present himself - abandoned, forgotten, lonely and sick by everyone. In the reworked "Wanderer", the artist expressed all his suffering, pain, despair and bitterness - all that he had to endure in recent years.

And in recent years, the painter had to face a misunderstanding of his colleagues - Itinerant artists, he even had to leave their organization, but until the end of his days he remained an Itinerant in spirit, leaving a deep mark in the history of Russian art.

In the early 80s, typhus and pneumonia finally undermined his health, and in October 1882, Perov's health sharply deteriorated. The artist quietly passed away at the 49th year of his life in a small hospital near Moscow.

You can read about the dramatic beginning of life, about the formation of Vasily Perov as a painter, about his genre canvases in review.