Serov, who hated asking for anything, found himself requesting a subsidy for the art journal
The sovereign agreed to yet another request from Serov: he ordered the release from prison of Savva Mamontov, a railroad magnate and patron of the arts, who was under investigation for alleged embezzlement. However, the emperor and the artist found themselves in conflict over Serov’s work.
Empress Alexandra, who considered herself a fair painter, came in during one of the sessions and started telling Serov how to improve the portrait. In response the artist, infuriated by this inappropriate art lesson, handed her his palette with the words, “Well, then, Your Majesty, you should do the painting, since you draw so well!”
Alexandra blew up, turned on her heel, and left; Nicholas, caught in the middle, ran after her and returned with an apology: the empress “went a bit overboard.”
The scene was unpleasant and humiliating for all the participants. Serov announced that he would no longer continue as court artist and demanded 4,000 rubles for the portrait, double the amount Nicholas had offered.
Nicholas had a courtier scold Serov for “taking advantage of the situation and setting a too high fee,” basically calling him a rip-off artist. Insulted, Serov asked for an apology.
Nicholas retreated and paid the demanded sum, but after that privately referred to the artist as “terribly insolent.” This was yet another farcical situation, not at all commensurate with previous ideas of what the relationship between monarch and subject should be in Russia.
The subsequent story of the painting was telling. In a surprise for everyone, Serov’s “private” portrait was exhibited with the
The initial effect was what Nicholas had intended. Everyone said (and wrote) that the sovereign in Serov’s portrait “looks into your soul.” But Serov’s later commentary was quite different: “Yes, yes, childlike pure, honest, kind eyes. Only executioners and tyrants have them.”35
Serov’s contempt for Nicholas II was fixed on January 9, 1905: on that fateful day, army troops in St. Petersburg shot at a peaceful workers’ demonstration for better wages. Serov happened to observe the shooting and was horrified.
In a wrathful letter to his friend Repin, Serov, as an artist, vividly described the tragic event:
What I saw from the windows of the Academy of Arts on 9 January I will never forget—the restrained, majestic, unarmed crowd walking toward the cavalry attack and rifle scope—a horrible vision. What I heard afterward was even more incredible in its horror. Did the fact that the sovereign did not deign to come out to the workers and receive their petition mean they must be attacked? And who had decided on that attack? No one and nothing can remove that stain.36
Serov’s portrait of Nicholas II is one of the few outstanding works that embody the perception of the Romanov dynasty in the mirror of Russian culture. The first was the equestrian statue of Peter the Great, Falconet’s Bronze Horseman, erected by Catherine the Great and still considered St. Petersburg’s calling card.
The Bronze Horseman—a dynamic Peter on a rearing steed that is Russia—was immortalized by Pushkin and remains in the Russian mind as the image of a forward-looking ruler. The work radiates energy, joy, and grandeur.
Another symbolic sculptural depiction of a Romanov, which immediately elicited comparisons with the Bronze Horseman, was the statue of Alexander III, erected in 1909 by Nicholas II. The sculptor was Prince Paolo Trubetskoy, of Russian heritage but in fact, like Falconet, a foreigner: he was born in Italy to an American mother, he grew up and was educated there, and came to Russia already an accomplished master, spending even less time there than Falconet.
Trubetskoy was an eccentric: he refused to read newspapers or books (and was proud of it) and was a fanatical vegetarian, even training the wolf and bear that lived in his studio to stick to a vegetarian diet.
Trubetskoy did a bust of Leo Tolstoy (also a vegetarian) that delighted the writer, so Tolstoy gave him his books. When the sculptor forgot them in the hallway when he left, Tolstoy was amused. (Nicholas II also liked Trubetskoy’s apparent naivete.)
Trubetskoy spoke Russian poorly and knew nothing about Russian history or politics, but he studied Falconet’s monument closely and considered his statue of Alexander III to be in competition with it. His portrait of a Romanov is a polar opposite of Falconet’s work: Trubetskoy depicted the tsar as a “fat-assed martinet,” to use Repin’s description, squashing beneath him a heavy, stubborn horse—symbol of a different Russia.
None of the higher officials wanted to have this monument in the imperial capital—its satirical overtones were painfully obvious—but the work pleased Alexander III’s wife: “Looks like him.” When the statue was unveiled at the square in front of the railroad station (like Falconet, Trubetskoy had left St. Petersburg before the event), everyone gasped. While people were awed by the statue of Peter I, they “laughed and wept inside” over the statue of Alexander III (as the essayist Vassily Rozanov described the reaction of Russian intellectuals).
The artist Benois, who had observed Alexander III up close, was a great admirer of his. Benois claimed that the prerevolutionary flourishing of Russian culture that is sometimes ascribed to the patronage of Nicholas was in fact primed by the reign of his father. If that giant had lived another twenty years, Benois went on, “The history of not only Russia but the world would have been different and certainly better.”37 But even Benois described Trubetskoy’s work as “a monument characteristic of a monarchy doomed to destruction.”
An acute observer, Benois felt that even though Nicholas II was “a nice man,” he fatally “lacked those special gifts that allow one to play with dignity the role of head and leader of a gigantic state.”38 Serov demonstrated that in his portrait, which thus became the final piece in the trinity of notable portrayals of Romanov rulers: from tsar-as-leader to tsar-as-keeper to “non-tsar.”
While the Bolsheviks never tampered with the Bronze Horseman, they tagged the statue of Alexander III with a mocking epigram caption by the proletarian poet Demyan Bedny:
My son and my father were executed in my lifetime
While I reaped the fate of posthumous ignominy,
I stand here as a cast-iron scarecrow for the country
That threw off the yoke of autocracy forever.
