The Russian School of Painting
ings, of which "The Fop" is, for those days, a bold satire on the ambitiousness of the "chinovniks" (bureaucrats), and "The Major's Courtship" is a gay, rather than sharp satire on the life of the merchant class. Then followed the series of pictures where he ridiculed the first attempts at a feministic movement, the ludicrous sides of the petty gentry, the bureaucracy, and various similar subjects—all of which were extensively exploited in the humoristic periodicals of the time. A place apart is occupied by his last works, in which he seems to turn to a quieter, more poetic, and more artistic way of looking at things. Such are his "Widow" and the "Officer at the Village," extraordinary in its poignant sadness.
Fedotov was lost for art when still young, because of a grave mental disease, which was shortly followed by death. If we take into consideration that he was all of thirty when he began to devote himself seriously to painting, it becomes clear that his art is more a brilliant "introduction" than a complete ensemble. This wide-awake artist, who with a truly astonishing rapidity developed from an awkward self-taught man into a brilliant painter—some of the "still-life's" in his pictures are worth the "old Dutchmen"—died before giving expression to the best that was in him. His immediate successor was another man from Moscow, Perov,
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