Realism, and "Purpose" Painting
who was, in keeping with the new spirit of the times, a bolder, but a less attractive and a less skilful artist than Fedotov.
Perov was born in 1833. His early life was spent in the country and at the city of Arzamas, where he started his artistic education at Stupin's Art School. Then he came to Moscow and attended the School of Painting and Sculpture. With Perov, the venerable old Capital definitely enters the history of Russian art. This happened not only because Moscow was the heart of Russian life in its most characteristic form, but also because the Capital possessed an art school where absolute freedom, at times degenerating into confusion and looseness, reigned supreme. The spirit of the fifties and the sixties, which hailed as its ideal the emancipation of human personality, was, naturally, inimical to all sorts of restraint, to all traditions binding the creative effort, and, consequently, to the Petrograd Academy with its Areopagus. Herein lay, however, a great danger for the young Russian art: it was becoming freer and more interesting, but, dazzled by the magnificence of literature, it was losing its "integrity," and at the same time it was turning away from its own inherent laws. A new period of Russian painting was inaugurated, the so-called "original Russian School" was coming into being, and at the same time
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