The Russian School of Painting
"school" in the technical sense was falling into sad oblivion.
Perov was a true child of his times. A man endowed with a great gift of observation—searching, daring, passionately devoted to his work, he is incontestably a fine manifestation of Russian culture, but his pictures are cheerless as such. They are stories in colour, which would be clearer and more impressive if told in words. What he was concerned with is not pictorial themes, but tales which can be told by means of painting. Even in Paris, whither he went as a scholar of the Academy, he missed the clash of the artistic currents, which was raging in the world city, and almost from the very day of his arrival he began to search in the Parisian streets for themes for narrative pictures, which made him famous in his own country. Of course, this search resulted in nothing, and having become entangled in his study of a world strange to him, he, with rare straightforwardness and conscientiousness, gave up his enterprise and applied for permission to return to Russia. This fact is a summary of a whole page of the history of Russian painting.
Unfortunately, not only for our art, but also for the whole of our culture, the feverish animation of our social life which followed the Crimean War and Alexander II's accession to the throne, too soon subsided,
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