Religious Painting
poetry of the human soul. Future men will look on them with that mystic thrill familiar to all who come in too intimate a contact with the life of past ages. In this respect, by far the most impressive work will seem his "Tolstoy," in the Tretyakov gallery, the wise and gloomy titan, deeply absorbed in his great work. Some of his portraits have all the charm of intimacy and all the gracefulness of domestic happiness. Especially remarkable is the portrait of Mme. Petrunkevich standing at a window opening on the forest. The quiet mood of a summer day in the country is rendered in this picture with admirable sincerity. It must be also observed, that the pictorial element of the portraits is of a finer quality than that of the pictures. In some of the former, for example in the famous portrait of Herzen, Gay attains the splendour and the firmness of Bryullov's brush, without falling into cheap effects and without betraying his essential character of inward nobility.
Others who chose Ivanov's way were Kramskoy, V. Vasnetzov, Nesterov and Vrubel. All four would be unthinkable without their great master, but no one of them reached his height; the first three because of lack of talent, the fourth, because of purely external circumstances, which did not allow him to unfold all the splendour of his brilliant and rare gifts. Kramskoy (1857–1887) is known in the history of Russian
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