International studio (42.1910)

Studio- Talk

"KONGSSATER" THE FOREST RESIDENCE OF THE KING AND QUEEN OF NORWAY ICR. BIONG, ARCHITECT

(See Christiania Studio-Talk on next page)

artists forming the " Soyouz," and was in fact impressionism. Nor, in spite of his undeniable

one of its most conspicuous members. predilection for social motives, does the artist at

- any time sink to the mere chronicler; light, colour

Possessed of a genuine gift for pictorial expres- and form are with him never simply a background

sion, in the display of which he employed the for a touching anecdote. In later years some

brush almost exclusively, only rarely resorting dramatic episodes in connection with labour

to graphic media, Ivanoff was before all else a troubles engaged him, but in general he turned

genrist and derived his motives almost entirely more and more to historic genre. The picturesque

from the life of the Russian people, always, architecture and the gay costumes of Russia fur-

whether portraying the present or the past, sue- nished the painter with a fund of material that was

ceeding in discovering the characteristic note, the naturally more congenial to his temperament. Yet

traits that are typical. The works belonging to Ivanoff never confined himself to a merely external

the first half of his career as an artist reflect the reconstruction of the past seen through the rose-

milieu of the Russian peasant of to-day in all his coloured spectacles of the " good old times." On

poverty and misery. Ivanoff here found a new the contrary, a sarcastic light is often shed upon the

field not yet explored by other Russian artists— Russian nature, the Russian " soul," and the bar-

the emigrant world with its families of land-tillers baric elements in it are pointedly emphasized,

driven from their homes through lack of land and -

forced to wander for hundreds of leagues to distant Readers of this magazine may recall some paint-
Siberia and there form themselves into new ings by Ivanoff which have, in recent years, been
colonies on a virgin soil. In a series of studies reproduced in its pages—such as A Sixteenth
and pictures the artist has portrayed these emi- Century Russian Military Expedition (vol. xxxi.,
grant figures in the midst of the treeless steppe p. 217) ; Maslianitsa (xxxv., 116), and The Arrival
with the glare of the sun full upon them, and apart of the Boyar (xlvi., 327). These works tell the
from the shrewd characterization which these pic- spectator more of old Russia than many pages
tures reveal, their plein-air qualities have given of descriptive narrative. The portrait of Ivanoff,
them an enduring place in the history of Russian reproduced opposite, was painted by his colleague,