Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

THE ACADEMY OF PAINTING.289

The day after my journey to Colpina, I visited the Academy of Painting, a superb and stately edifice, which up to the present time contains but few good works. How can they be expected in a land where the young artists wear uniform? I found all the pupils of the Academy enrolled, dressed, and commanded like marine cadets. This fact alone denotes a profound contempt for the object pretended to be patronised, or rather a great ignorance of the nature and the mysteries of art; professed indifference would be less indicative of barbarism. There is nothing free in Russia except objects for which the government does not care ; it cares only too much for the arts; but it is ignorant that they cannot dispense with liberty, and that this sympathy between the works of genius and the independence of man would alone attest the nobleness of the artist's profession.

I went over numerous studios, and found there distinguished landscape-painters : their compositions display imagination and even colour. I particularly admired a picture representing St. Petersburg on a summer's night, by M. YorobiefF: it is beautiful as nature, poetical as truth. This picture reminded me of my first arrival in Russia, when the summer nights consisted of no more than two twilights : the effect of such perpetual day, which pierces through obscurity like a bright lamp through a gauze veil, could not be better rendered. I saw again the polar light, so different from the colouring of other scenes, which I had first beheld on the Baltic. To be able thus exactly to characterise the special phenomena of nature, proves a high degree of merit.

There is much talk in Russia of the talent of

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