Description
Genre painting
The importance given to domestic, rural and urban reality begins to gain in art when it represents characters busy with their daily chores. Designating the representation of everyday scenes, genre painting belongs with landscape and still life to “minor genres” in the academic hierarchy of the 17th century. The introduction of the everyday in painting actually dates back to the 14th century, when Tuscan artists transposed the great religious episodes, and French and Flemish illuminators celebrate the diversity of human activities in their works.
In the 16th century, genre painting took on its autonomy with the appearance of moralizing, religious and allegorical themes. This century saw Pierre Bruegel become the interpreter of a peasant reality which was no longer limited to working in the fields, thanks to fairs and weddings now integrated into his repertoire.
In the 17th century, the Le Nain brothers gave peasants access to a classical grandeur – until then refused – while Georges de La Tour blurred the boundaries between religious and layman by giving his representations of everyday life a sacred dimension. In Holland and Flanders, the enthusiasm of the bourgeoisie for small formats of the genre scene led Hals and Teniers – then several generations of small masters – to favor this production made up of taverns, inns or country scenes. Under the leadership of Vermeer, another trend is emerging in Holland based on the silence of an interior and domestic life bathed in soft lights, while Spanish tenebrism is inspired by picaresque literature to represent the people, through its small trades or his needy.
Sergueï VINOGRADOV
Sergei Arsenievitch VINOGRADOV was born in 1869 northeast of Moscow and died in 1938 in Riga, Latvia. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1880 to 1889, where he frequented Sorokine, Makovski and Polenov, students in his class. He graduated as an artist in 1888 and then studied at the studio of Boris Willewalde and Carl Wenig at the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg. In 1903, he founded the Society of Russian Artists and became a member of the Company of Traveling Painters. This term is given to the realist movement which appeared in Russia in 1863, in reaction to the teaching of Fine Arts in St Petersburg.
From 1898 to 1913, he taught at the Stroganov Academy in Moscow, where he was appointed academician in 1912. During the war, he was the author of several relief posters for the Red Cross and succeeded in emigrating to Latvia in 1920, where he began to teach. He exhibited his works in Düsseldorf, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Prague, New York and Riga.
The work & its composition
Peasant iconography is one of the important themes of Nordic painting, but not only. While some develop this subject in a parody mode, in which the peasants are assimilated to immoral characters, being able to indulge only in rude acts, this is not the case for Sergei VINOGRADOV. His canvas takes a humanist and realistic look at the rural world. While he represents peasant women in all simplicity at lunchtime, he is no less benevolent towards his subject. The peasant women may indulge in the pleasure of a break – in a gentle and peaceful atmosphere preceding their daily work – they are no less blamed, because each of us knows the harshness of the rural world. Actors in their own right on the natural scene, these peasant women belong to the harmony and natural order of life and its modest pleasures.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.