The Eighteenth Century
enlivening them. The master delighted in noting realistic details in them, and this trait bestows upon his work a great historical interest.
It seems proper here to anticipate somewhat and to treat a group of artists who, although they lived in the nineteenth, kept up the landscape traditions of the eighteenth century. All these artists were by no means landscape painters in our acceptance of the term. Nature, her moods and colours held no interest for them; they, too, were typical, somewhat narrow "view-painters," to use the contemporary term, that is, portraitists of definite localities. Those, however, who were endowed with a more artistic soul could not help introducing some poetry into their copying. They also mastered, more or less completely, the delicate problems of light and colour.
Among these artists belong Galaktionov, Martynov, Maxim Vorobyov, Alexander Bryullov, partly also Silvestre Shchedrin and M. Lebedev, and finally, the distant epigones of the school of M. Ivanov and F. Alexyeyev: Fricke, the brothers Chernetzov, Erassi, Lagorio, Goravsky and numerous architects who practised water-colour painting. Especially noteworthy are the first four artists. As to Silvestre Shchedrin and M. Lebedev, we shall deal with them later on, in discussing the first steps of modern landscape painting.
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