Pavel
Andreevich Fedotov was born in Moscow, in 1815, the son of a retired officer.
Graduating from the Moscow Cadet School, he served for ten years in the
Finland Regiment of the Imperial Guards in St. Petersburg. When still in
the Army, Fedotov, like many of his fellow-officers, was concerned in art
and occupied his leisure with playing the flute, taking part in amateur
performances, and doing a lot of drawing and painting. Amateurism, thriving
in the first half of the 19th century, largely determined the tastes of
the Russian educated milieu and became a reserve for professional art.
At one time, Fedotov attended the evening classes at the Academy of Fine
Arts. As a student he was not particularly outstanding, yet, in the Army,
he gained a reputation as a regiment painter by his portraits of officers
and regiment scenes. Fedotov had already mastered the technique of the
then popular watercolor portrait. He began to turn to caricature, but satirical
subjects, like that of the Police Commissary’s
Reception Room the Night before a Holiday (1837), were rare.
At that early period Fedotov preferred to depict what he had seen at firsthand
enjoying every manifestation of life’s beauty. He had not yet started painting
in oils, limiting himself entirely to graphic techniques (pencil and watercolor).
The career of a regiment painter, however attractive, did not appeal to
Fedotov, who understood that a true creative artist should devote himself
to art completely. In 1844, he retired to give himself entirely to painting.
It wasn’t an easy decision – his officer’s salary was his only income,
from which he also had to support his kin in Moscow. Fedotov concentrated
his effort on portraiture, he painted small portraits, mostly of his friends
or their relations. Thus he produced a series of portraits showings the
members of the family of Zhdanovich, Fedotov’s friend in the regiment.
The portraits, in no way ceremonial, are simple and unsophisticated; they
all have an air of the genre and are characterized by a deep insight into
the model. The Portrait of Natalia Zhdanovich
at the Harpsichord (c. 1850) is especially striking by its
serenity and perfect spiritual harmony, and revels the painter’s concern
with the inner life of a human being.
Fedotov began to paint in oils in 1846, his first attempt at the new technique
and also his first genre composition, the Newly
Decorated, Difficult Bride,
Untimely
Guest, are full of satire and criticism. The supreme achievement
of this period of the artist’s maturity is the Major’s
Marriage Proposal (1851). Fedotov’s works were recognized as
a new word in art at the exhibitions of 1849 and 1850 in St. Petersburg
and Moscow and brought the painter success that promised his prosperity
and, hence, the possibility to continue his work.
However, after the trial of the Petrashevsky social-democratic group, with
which he was closely associated, Fedotov found himself in isolation. Fedotov
wrote in one of his letters, “The furor my works created… appears to have
been a gnat’s buzz rather than a thunder, since at the time, a real thunder
was heard from the West when thrones were shaking in Europe.” To the revolutionary
events of 1848 and 1949 in Europe the Tsarist government responded by persecutions
against freedom of thought in Russia. Sharing the fate of the many democratic-minded
intelligensia, Fedotov was crushed by the reactionary tide. But before
he perished, Fedotov had produced his, probably, best works imbued with
a feeling of desperate sorrow gradually growing until it reached its climax
in the Encore, Encore!, Gamblers,
and Young Widow.
In 1852, after a period of suffering, he died in a mental clinic.
Bibliography:
Fedotov. by L. Sarabyanov. Russian Painters of the XIX century.
Moscow. 1985.
Pavel Fedotov. by E. Kuznetsov. Leningrad. 1990.