Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

the honours of an excellent house in Petersburg, which will be always called the Hotel de Laval, out of respect for the memory of the Emperor Paul, to whom an expiatory veneration is indeed owing.

THE ACADEMY OF PAINTING.289

The day after my journey to Colpina, I visited the Academy of Painting, a superb and stately edifice, which up to the present time contains but few good works. How can they be expected in a land where the young artists wear uniform? I found all the pupils of the Academy enrolled, dressed, and commanded like marine cadets. This fact alone denotes a profound contempt for the object pretended to be patronised, or rather a great ignorance of the nature and the mysteries of art; professed indifference would be less indicative of barbarism. There is nothing free in Russia except objects for which the government does not care ; it cares only too much for the arts; but it is ignorant that they cannot dispense with liberty, and that this sympathy between the works of genius and the independence of man would alone attest the nobleness of the artist's profession.

I went over numerous studios, and found there distinguished landscape-painters : their compositions display imagination and even colour. I particularly admired a picture representing St. Petersburg on a summer's night, by M. YorobiefF: it is beautiful as nature, poetical as truth. This picture reminded me of my first arrival in Russia, when the summer nights consisted of no more than two twilights : the effect of such perpetual day, which pierces through obscurity like a bright lamp through a gauze veil, could not be better rendered. I saw again the polar light, so different from the colouring of other scenes, which I had first beheld on the Baltic. To be able thus exactly to characterise the special phenomena of nature, proves a high degree of merit.

There is much talk in Russia of the talent of

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Brulow. His Last Day of Pompeii produced, it is said, some sensation even in Italy. This enormous . piece of canvass is now the glory of the Russian school: let not the reader ridicule the designation : I saw a saloon, on the door of which these words were inscribed—'The Russian School/' The colouring of Brulow's painting appeared to me to be false, though certainly the subject is calculated to conceal this fault: for who knows the shade of the tints that clad the structures of Pompeii on their last day ? The painter has a hard, dry touch, but he exhibits power : his conceptions lack neither imagination nor originality. His heads display truth and variety : if he understood the management of the ehiaro oscuro, he might some day deserve the reputation that is given to him here : at present he is deficient in natural style, in colouring, in lightness, and in grace: there is no want of a species of wild poetry in his compositions, but their general effect is disagreeable. His style, which is stiff, without being devoid of a certain nobleness, reminds one of the imitators of the school of David. In a painting of the Assumption, which we are obliged to admire at Petersburg, because it is the work of the famous Brulow, I observed clouds so heavy that they might have been sent to represent rocks at the Opera.

There are heads, however, in the Pompeii picture which discover real talent. The painting, notwithstanding its faults as a composition, would gain in celebrity by being engraved; for it is in the colouring that its chief defects lie.

It is said that since his return to Russia, the painter has lost much of bis enthusiasm for the art. How

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I pity him for having seen Italy, since he was obliged to return to the north ! He does not work hard ; and unfortunately his rapid facility, which is here viewed as a merit, appears but too plainly in his pieces. It is only by assiduous pains and labour that he could succeed in conquering the stiffness of his design, and the crudeness of his colouring. Great painters know the difficulty of learning to design without the pencil, to paint by the intershading and blending of colours, to efface from the canvass, lines which exist nowhere in nature, to show the air, which exists everywhere, to conceal art,—in short, faithfully to depict the real, yet at the same time to ennoble it.

I am told that he passes much more of his time in drinkin2; than in working: I blame him less than I pity him. Here, every thing is good if it only tend to impart a glow : wine is the sun of Russia. If to the misery of being a Russian is added the circumstance of being a painter, the individual ought to expatriate himself. Must not the land, where there is night for three months of the year, and where the snow sheds brighter radiance than the sun, be a land of exile to the painter ?

By endeavouring to reproduce the singularities of nature under these latitudes, a few character-painters may win for themselves the honour of a place on the steps of the temple of arts ; but an historical painter ought to fly this climate. Peter the Great laboured in vain; nature will always place bounds to the fancies of men, were they justified by the ukases of twenty czars.

I have seen one work of M. Brulow's which is truly о 2

292MADEMOISELLE TAGLIOXI.

admirable : it is unquestionably the best of all the modern paintings in Petersburg ; though, indeed, it is a copy of an ancient chef-d'oeuvre, the School of Athens, and is full as large as the original. When an individual knows how thus to reproduce one, perhaps, of Raphael's most inimitable works after his Madonnas, he ought to return to Rome, there to learn to do something better than 'The Last Day of Pompeii' and ' The Assumption of the Virgin.'*

The vicinity of the Pole is unfavourable to the arts, with the exception of poetry, which' can sometimes dispense with all material except the human soul; it is then the volcano under the ice. But for the inhabitants of these dreadful climates, music, painting, the dance — all those pleasures of sensation which are partially independent of mind — lose their charms in losing their organs. What are Rembrandt, Corregio, Michael Angelo, and Raphael, in a dark room ? The north has doubtless its own kind of beauty, but it is still a palace without light : all the attractive train of youth, with their pastimes, their smiles, their graces, and their dances, confine themselves to those blest regions where the rays of the sun, not content with gliding over the surface of the earth, warm and fertilise its bosom by piercing it from on high.

In Russia a double gloom pervades every thing — the fear of power and the want of sun. The national dances resemble rounds led by shadows under the gleam of a twilight which never ends. Ma-

* M. Bi·ulow has copied several of Raphael's works; but I was especially struck with the beauty of the one here mentioned.

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demoiselle Taglioni herself (alas ! for Mademoiselle Taglioni!) is not a perfect dancer at St. Petersburg. What a fall for La Sylphide ! But when she walks in the streets — for she walks at present — she is followed by footmen in handsome cockades and gold lace; and the newspapers overwhelm her every morning with articles containing the most preposterous praises I have ever seen. This is all the Russians, notwithstanding their cleverness,, ean do for the arts and for artistes. What the latter want is a heaven to give them life, a public which can understand them, a society which can excite and inspire them. These are necessaries : rewards are