International studio (50.1913)

Studio-Talk

recently noticed in these columns, owed its
“ clou ” to the works of the young artist N.
Sapunoff, whose career was cut short by an un-
timely death, so the centre of attraction at this
year’s exhibition of the “ Soyouz ” was a collection
of pictures, drawings and sketches by A. P.
Riabushkin, who died in 1904 when only forty-three
years old. It is scarcely conceivable, however,
that this society should have allowed eight years
to pass before rendering this homage to such a
talented member, and, more than that, should have
arranged this posthumous exhibition with so little
thought, for it contained only a small part of his
output, and quite inadequately represented the
range of his activity.
Andrei Petrovitch Riabushkin (1861-1904) was,
like many another modern Russian artist, the son
of a simple painter of ikons, to whom he owed a
certain familiarity with the craft of painting. He
received his training as an artist at the Moscow
School of Art as well as at the Imperial Academy
of Arts in St. Petersburg, where he quickly attracted
attention by his originality. But though he be-
came a thoroughly modern artist in a technical
sense, he was always imbued with a rooted
antipathy to modern life, and remained through-
out his career a child of

painting They're Coming in the Alexander III
Museum, in St. Petersburg, the village scene here
produced from the work in the Troyanovski
Collection, and many another picture from Ria-
bushkin’s hand, count among the best that modern
Russian genre painting has produced. Many of
his works possess a rare poetic charm, and his
sense of the primitive barbaric element in old
Russian life is keener than that of Ivanoff, who
painted the same class of subject, and further he
possessed a far stronger feeling for style. It is
interesting as well as pathetic to follow the painter’s
development; beginning with the wholly realistic
genre picture, he gradually evolved a decorative
style peculiarly his own, in which the restrained
colour of his earlier work gave place to an ever-
increasing brilliance, until this line of development
was suddenly arrested by the lung trouble which
brought his career to an end.
At the “ Soyouz ” exhibition very few of Ria-
busbkin’s finest historical illustrations were to be
seen. Among his large paintings there were two
which claimed particular attention—one of a very
typical representation of a sixteenth-century Russian
merchant’s family, the other depicting the entry
into Moscow of a foreign Ambassador at the same

the people among whom
he had his origin. It was
only by contact with the
people, with their simple
primitive ideas and out-
look, that his talent was
stimulated to fruitful
activity and he became
one of the finest and most
attractive portrayers of
the life of the Russian
people, his work being en-
tirely free from any anec-
dotal or literary flavour.
He could enter deeply
into their thoughts and
feelings and grasp their
characteristic traits and
picturesque features, and
as a result of earnest
study he was able to
create an historic perspec-
tive for them. His Church
Scene in the Seventeenth
Century, belonging to the
Tretiakoff gallery, the
80


LITHOGRAPHIC ILLUSTRATION TO GOGOL’S “ NEVSKI PROSPECT”
BV D. KORDOVSKI