Vasiliy
Dmitrievich Polenov was born into a noble and intelligent family; his father
was a high-ranking military officer and archeologist. His mother was fond
of fine arts and was an amateur painter. Their son inherited the talents
of both parents – love for science and for art.
He studied simultaneously in the St. Petersburg University and in the Academy
of Arts. In 1871, he got a diploma of a lawyer and a Major Gold Medal in
the Academy for his picture Raising of Jairus'
Daughter (1871). It took him several years to decide
to go in favor of painting. As a pensioner of the Academy he traveled to
Germany, Italy, France, painted historical and genre pictures and portraits.
But most attractive for him was landscape painting on plein air. He studied
the works of French landscape painters, especially those by the Barbizon
school.
In 1876 he returned to Russia. In 1878, at the exhibition of the Itinerants’
Society of Traveling Exhibitions he displayed his Moscow
Backyard (1878). In this serene picture he managed to unite
spontaneity and frankness of plein air perception with Russian landscape
tradition and intimate lyricism. His next works Granny's
Orchard (1878), Pond
(1879), and studies of 1881-82, which he made during his trip to Greece
and the Middle East, established his fame as one of the best Russian landscape
painters. He was the first to introduce the principles of ‘European influence’
in Russia, these were the basics of plein air painting: clean and bright
colors, colored shadows, free strokes. In 1882-84, Polenov taught in the
Moscow School of Painting. Among his students were Isaac
Levitan, Constantin Korovin,
A. Arkhipov and others.
The artist also created a series of canvases devoted to Jesus Christ. He
visited Palestine twice, studied the landscape, architecture, people of
the land. During 1888-1909 he created dozens of works devoted to Christ:
Christ
and Woman Taken in Adultery (1886-1887), On
the Genisaret (Tiberias) Lake (1886). His manner of depicting
Christ was new, and his compositions, though academic, were rather realistic.
Polenov worked much for theater, he was one of the reformers of theater
decorative art. In Moscow he built a House of Theatral Education in 1915.
In his estate of Borok, where he created many of his landscapes, he collected
objects of art to open a museum. Now it is a Museum of Polenov.
Notes
Le droit du Seigneur, the
right of a lord, is the old medieval right of a lord to spend the first
night with a newlywed girl from his serfs. Although serfdom was abolished,
the right itself, though seldom used, remained in force until the late
18th century; the intrigue of the famous play La Folle Journee ou le
marriage de Figaro (1784) by Beaumarchais, better known through the
opera by Rossini, is based on this custom.
The Arrest of a Huguenot
is a historical episode depicting the events of the 16th century in France,
when political and economical instability in France, weakness of the last
Valois-line kings, and intrigues of their mother Catherine de’ Medici led
to religious wars between Roman Catholics and Huguenots (French Protestants),
which resulted in slaughter of Parisian Huguenots in 1572.
Bibliography: Polenov by T. Yurova. Moscow. Iskusstvo. 1972.
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