The Russian School of Painting
Arts, is painted throughout in an unusually harmonious and beautiful colour-gamut, which reminds one of Greuse and even of older masters; and his portrait of Alexander I is by no means inferior in pomposity to the official portraits of Borovikovsky or N. Argunov. Yet our conception of Shchukin is strangely unsettled: he is too versatile and, at the same time, never very pronounced, never very characteristic. He is a good artist of a vivid talent, impressionable, but superficial and vacillating. One masterpiece, however, he did create. It is the portrait of Paul I (in Gatchina), which is worth a whole historical treatise—the most characteristic and expressive of all the portraits of the tragical and enigmatical figure of Catherine's successor.
It has been mentioned already that along with the portraitists of the first period of Russian painting, the landscape painters also deserve the historian's attention. Indeed, some of the masters of landscape, who became prominent under Catherine, still preserve their importance. Already under Elizabeth we find Makhayev, whose works, if they do not reveal any talent, show that the teaching of perspective in the Academy reached a fairly high level. Another artist, Perezinotti's pupil, Alexyey Byelsky, who also became prominent under Elizabeth and who took part in the decora-
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