the musty smells of autumn and admiring its even, grey hues.
The joyful mood which Abramtsevo and Domotkanovo engendered in Serov helped the artist create his most significant early pieces. Almost all of Serov’s works of this period, from the studies of the mid-1880s to the masterpieces, the Two Girls and Overgrown Pond, painted at about the same time in Domotkanovo, are imbued with the same feeling. Serov immerses himself, as it were, in the beauty of the world, his colours are saturated with light and air, soaked by the sun, and radiating joy. He contemplates this beauty with quiet admiration. Each picture is long in the making; he has his models pose for long hours, yet what is revealed on canvas is the very first impression of what he sees.
The model for Girl with Peaches was Mamontov’s twelve-year-old daughter Vera, who sat for the artist in Abramtsevo, for Sunlit Girl, the artist’s cousin Maria Simonovich in Domotkanovo. The two girls turned out to resemble one another, but most of the “blame” for that must go to Serov himself who wanted, above all, to see in them the beauty of youth. He sought in these pictures a gentle, contemplative expressiveness. He did not intend the portraits to provoke thoughts on the contradictions and complexities of life, “only the joys of life”. And it is this that sets Serov apart from his predecessors and his teachers. Repin’s portrait of Modest Moussorgsky, done six years before Girl with Peaches, is also suffused with light, but in this case, it only serves to render with the utmost veracity the aspect and condition of the composer going through a terminal illness. Behind the fleeting moment of human existence captured by the artist there looms a world choked by insoluble problems, a world whose only promise to man is suffering and perdition. With Serov, though, light, air, joy, and youth are beautiful per se; they are the ultimate purpose of the creative act, and it is in this above all else that the novelty of Serov’s approach and the originality of his artistic concept manifest themselves.
The Girls were painted from living persons, yet Serov did not refer to the paintings as portraits or give them the names of the models. This was hardly accidental, because the decisive factor was not the uniqueness of the image, not the individuality of the sitter, but rather Serov’s overall program. In addition, these were not portraits in the customary meaning of the word. Serov’s models are inseparable from their environment. One girl merges into a single entity with the old house and the garden visible through the windows, the other has settled down, as if for good, in the shade of a tree in a sleepy corner of an old, unkempt park. Neither can be imagined in other surroundings, because then we would have different pictures carrying different messages.
Pomors, 1894.
Oil on wood, 33 × 23.3 cm.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Catherine II Setting out to Hunt with Falcons, 1902.
Tempera and gouache on cardboard, 23 × 40 cm.
The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
Abraham’s Servant Finds Isaac a Bride, Rebekah, 1894.
Oil on panel, 23.5 × 33 cm.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Portrait of Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich, 1897.
Oil on canvas, 166.7 × 149.5 cm.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
In Girl with Peaches, one actually senses a momentary stillness, a pregnant calm, after which the young creature will erupt into motion and transform the whole interior by mixing up the objects. Movement in the composition is stressed by a receding tabletop and a foreshortened figure. Serov offsets this movement with the pink triangle of the blouse and the free symmetry of the objects scattered around the room, seemingly at random but actually deliberately arranged.
A different motif is chosen for Sunlit Girl. The girl abides in a state of complete rest, with no intention of interrupting it. There is a stillness throughout, a repose, a fusion of the human being with the sun, the air, the environment. Whereas in Girl with Peaches the artist achieves the effect of balanced movement with the help of various compositional devices, here the opposite is true: he seeks to resolve the theme by harmoniously contrasting the motionless figure in the foreground against a backdrop that creates the impression of a spatial “breakthrough”. In both cases Serov transcends the “study”, and though he paints from nature he never loses sight of the finished picture existing in his mind’s eye. This is where he differs from his constant companion Korovin, and in this lies his potential for further change.
There is every indication in both cases of a penchant for Impressionism. Serov did not perceive the environment as a backdrop, as an accompaniment to the main theme. He was interested in every physical object that came into view and in every inch of the painted canvas. With Serov, the surface of each object reflects the light of adjacent objects and absorbs the rays of the sun. Everything is built on subtle transitions – the gradations of the colour values are almost imperceptible, the contours of the figures and objects begin to shift. Moreover, Serov discovers the beauty of colour as such: the tender pink of the girl’s blouse stands in magnificent contrast to the black bow; the deep blue of the skirt in Sunlit Girl does not seem subject to the influence of the sun and retains its integrity. Each pure colour, though, finds its “echo” in other parts of the canvas, sustaining the unity of the work.
Speaking of Serov’s Impressionism, we must bear in mind that it differs essentially from that of the French. To begin with, in the period in question Serov knew very little about the French Impressionists. The French artist he liked most, sharing this preference with many of his colleagues, was the extremely popular Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose manner was a far cry from true Impressionism. Nevertheless, the logic of Russian art’s evolution, its interest in plein air painting and the experience gained in the study of nature all conspired to lead Serov to Impressionist painting.
Summertime. Portrait of Olga Serova, 1895.
Oil on canvas, 73.5 × 93.8 cm.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Sasha Serov, 1897.
Watercolour and white lead on paper, 42 × 58 cm.
Serov Collection, Moscow.
Portrait of Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, 1898.
Oil on canvas, 94 × 111 cm.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
The successes achieved by Repin, Polenov, and Surikov in their depictions of nature opened up new vistas before the younger artists. But for Serov’s Girls paintings, as for Korovin in Chorus Girl or Levitan in Birch Grove, it was not enough to emulate their elders. His was a resolute step toward a new system, a step that makes it possible to regard him, together with his contemporaries, as a founder of early Russian Impressionism, a method distinguished for its modesty, restraint, and a certain stylistic disparity. In Serov’s pictures, the painting of the human face was, as yet, substantially different from that of the landscape or interior. In Girl with Peaches, Vera Mamontova’s head is painted in smooth tenuous strokes, where the form and colour coincide completely, whereas in the blouse and the bow they do not. Serov often uses large areas of pure colour,
