Video: The most mysterious of all strangers: who was the "Unknown" artist Ivan Kramskoy
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
One of the most outstanding works of the famous Russian artist of the 19th century. Ivan Kramskoy is an "Unknown", who is also often called the "Stranger". There were many rumors around this painting during the artist's lifetime. Who was the woman portrayed by the Itinerant? The author did not reveal this secret, and at the moment there are many interesting versions regarding the prototype of the most famous "Unknown".
Neither in the letters nor in the diaries of Ivan Kramskoy there is any mention of the personality of this woman. Several years before the appearance of the painting, L. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was published, which gave rise to some researchers to assert that Kramskoy portrayed the main character of the novel. Others find similarities with Nastasya Filippovna from Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot.
Most researchers are still inclined to think that the prototype has not literary, but quite real origin. The external similarity made us say that the artist portrayed the beautiful Matryona Savvishna - a peasant woman who became the wife of the nobleman Bestuzhev.
Many argue that "Unknown" is a collective image of a woman who could not serve as an example to follow. Allegedly, Kramskoy painted a picture in order to expose the moral foundations of society - painted lips, fashionable expensive clothes give out a rich kept woman in a woman. Critic V. Stasov called this picture "Kokotka in a carriage", other critics wrote that Kramskoy depicted "an expensive camellia", "one of the fiends of big cities."
Later, a sketch for this painting was discovered in one of the private Czech collections. The woman on it looks arrogant and rude, she looks defiantly at the passers-by. This gave rise to the assertion that the artist really hatched the idea to create an accusatory portrait. However, in the final version, Kramskoy softened the features of the stranger, ennobling her appearance. There is a version that his daughter, Sophia Kramskaya, posed for the artist for this picture. If we compare "Unknown" with the painting "Girl with a Cat" - a portrait of her daughter, then the external resemblance is really striking.
One of the most interesting versions belongs to the author of the book “The Destiny of Beauty. Stories of Georgian Wives”to Igor Obolensky. He claims that the prototype of the stranger was Princess Varvara Turkestanishvili, the maid of honor of Empress Maria Feodorovna, the favorite of Alexander I, to whom she gave birth to a daughter. After the birth of his daughter, the emperor lost interest in both mother and child, and after that Barbara committed suicide. In the 1880s. Kramskoy saw a cameo with a portrait of the princess, which the emperor had once presented to her. He was struck by the beauty and tragic death of the Georgian woman and decided to paint her portrait.
However, all versions remain at the level of assumptions, and the name of the stranger remains a secret. The tradition of painting portraits of strangers is preserved in modern painting, for example, strangers artist Jason Thielke
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