Studio: international art (30.1904)

Modern Russian Art

and animation. It is inspired by the sweet reverie attractive, that his courtly manners and polished
of a poet, and executed with the winsome naivete speech, with his frank and almost boyish expression,
of a painter of genius. and his merry blue eyes, win all hearts.

Of work in hand, his Victory with her Old He is perfectly original in his art. He appeals
Fighting Consorts at Portsmouth, is a splendid to the heart as well as to the eye. He shows the
piece of painting. The illumination of the old feeling of Nature in all her moods. He is ever
battleships riding at anchor, and of the sea and varied, never conventional. His character and his
sky wherein they are reflected by the crimson art are alike—truthful, simple, and refined,
afterglow, is gorgeous. The whole picture is E. Staley.

on fire, with something ot Turner's spontaneity

and brilliance. The idea came to Hoist years OME NOTES ON MODERN

and years ago at Plymouth, before some of those RUSSIAN ART. BY ROSA NEW-

noble wooden walls were broken up. . j MARCH.

A visit to Hoist's studio is a charming ex-
perience. Not only has he much to show and to When, at the close of the tenth century, the
interest his guest, but his own personality is so first ikons, or sacred pictures, were imported

into Russia, the few en-
lightened spirits of the
time were engaged in
the hard task of Chris-
tianising the masses, and
striving to create a social
life out of chaos. The
sparse population of
Russia, scattered over a
vast region of bogs and
forests, was slow to adopt
the most primitive elements
of political and religious
culture, and wholly indif-
ferent to aesthetic interests.
To this predominance
of religious influences we
must attribute the phe-
nomenon of an exclusively
sacred art, subordinated
to ecclesiastical authority
for a period of fully eight
centuries. And, except to
the specialist learned in
the rival peculiarities of
the "traditional Greek," or
the jriajsky styles of ikono-
graphy, this long period
offers nothing of variety or
interest.

Even more dreary is the
imitative period of the
eighteenth century, when
a host of second-rate
French and Italian painters
ministered to the un-
cultured taste of the
portrait of the novelist tourgexiev by kharlamov aristocracy. Nor was there