I
f someone had told the son of a Moscow merchant who became a land surveyor and then a clerk that he was destined to play a historical role in Russian art, he would have shrugged his shoulders and said that he was merely an amateur. Yet he really did play this role. Taking private lessons he quickly became a professional, having found his particularly intimate style as a portrait painter. He was elected to the Academy of Arts for one of his portraits. Remaining true to this genre, he nonetheless turned to another field and founded the first illustrated satirical sheet in Russia, The Journal of Caricature. However, autocrats are not very favourably inclined towards satire. Venetsianov's brainchild did not exist for very long. The tsarist censorship banned the edition after the third issue.
The artist's main school was the meticulous copying of famous pictures from the collection of the St. Petersburg Hermitage. He spent ten years of his life doing this. But then the turning point came. Venetsianov left the capital and came to live in a village near Tver where he began to paint portraits of peasants. No Russian artist had allowed himself this before.
As to Venetsianov he pictured actual people, serf peasant men and women, village-children and craftsmen. He deliberately laid emphasis not only on their external beauty but also on their spiritual world. Then the artist went even further, starting to portray scenes from daily village life and peasant work.
Venetsianov felt an acute need to teach. He offered his services to the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture. But he was not accepted. The village spirit was not to the liking of the professors. Then he founded his own "academy" in the village enrolling serf boys, house-painters and icon artists. This school played a large part in the rise of realistic art in Russia. True to life, Venetsianov's pupils became the precursors of the Peredvizhniki, democratic artists who placed their talent at the service of the people.
Dostoyevsky wrote: "The purpose of art lies not in the accidents of daily life but in their general idea caught by the alert eye and faithfully copied from the multitude of similar phenomena of life." This could well have been said about Alexei Venetsianov and his school.
