Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov, 1862-1942

Private Collection, Czech Republic

Vasily Nesterov was a painter of the Russian soul. ‘Na zemlye pokoi’ or ‘Peace on Earth’ of 1912, recently rediscovered from a private collection in the Czech Republic, can be considered an important work in his pre-revolutionary oeuvre. It appears to relate most closely to a work of 1914 affectionately called ‘Lisichka’ with three old Startsy or holy men sitting on a river bank watching a fox emerge from the undergrowth (see figure 1). This latter work is traditionally thought to be part of a triptych based on the gospel text, ‘…peace on earth, good will towards men’ (St. Luke 2:11,14). The offered lot being the same height as ‘Lisichka’ could perhaps have been conceived as its partner panel.

The Orthodox religion was the great guiding force and wellspring of Nesterov’s creative search. Studying under Vasili Perov at the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, he learnt from this master how paintings could convey both a social message and also offer an emotional resonance. Nesterov took this further to develop a genre of spiritual painting which combined elements of landscape, genre and history painting. It was at the end of the 1880s that he first found his own voice as an artist and quickly produced some of his greatest works. This period was marked by personal tragedy with the sudden death of his wife in 1886 and led to a composition, ‘The Bride of Christ’ which the artist claimed was a way of working out his grief, but also later said marked the beginning of his own personal artistic journey. The following year he painted ‘The Hermit’ (figure 2), immediately acquired by Pavel Tretyakov for his gallery. This work bears much in common with the offered lot, both compositions uniting nature and man, one flowing directly from and into the other.

Nesterov’s landscapes are those of the Russian north, imbibed with its special light and the fertile land around his hometown of Ufa, close to the Ural mountains in Western Russia. The people inhabiting his pictures have all grown up out of the land and its local traditions and legends. He chooses innocent yet meditative heroes and heroines, of slight build and pale of face: women, hermits, philosophers, Russian saints in their youth. In ‘Na Zemlye Pokoi’ the protagonist appears to be a young monk piping or perhaps he is the fictitious Lel, the shepherd boy from Alexander Ostrovsky’s libretto for the Opera ‘Snegurochka’, set to music by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1881. Nesterov painted this subject on a number of occasions, see for example ‘Lel (Spring),1933, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (figure 3). Other similar compositions can be found with figures in a landscape making music, either piping or, as in ‘Elegy’ of 1928, a lone, blind monk playing the violin.

Stylistically, ‘Na Zemlye Pokoi’ conforms to the artist’s painterly scheme developed in the late 80s and little changed throughout his career. It is can be seen as a mix of Impressionism and Art Nouveau. He worked up his larger compositions from small landscape studies executed ‘en plein air’, in location. He visited and painted in the North of Russia, the environs of Abramtsevo with its famous artist colony, or most often in his home region of Ufa (see figure 4). ‘Na Zemlye Pokoi’ depicts the River Belaya close to Ufa, and a study from the identical viewpoint as used in this composition is recorded in the Nesterov family collection, see Gosudarstvennaya Tretyakovskaya Galereia, ‘Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov, 1862-1942, Katalog Vystavka’, Moscow, 1990, p.65 cat no. 75.

Nesterov was well known by the turn of the century as a monumental mural painter, having undertaken many significant church and cathedral commissions following a creative partnership with Victor Vasnetsov. Although Art Nouveau was an important movement in Russian architecture and decorative artist, it is in the paintings of Nesterov in particular that it found expression in Russian Fine Art. In ‘Na Zemlye Pokoi’ the decorative scheme that underpins the composition takes its key from Art Nouveau, with the elongated grasses and brightly coloured flowers, the serpentine river, the elegant curves of the Lel’s hands and the vibrating strokes of the riverside, where land meets water.

Despite their proximity to Impressionist plein air practice, Nesterov’s works are not close to those of his Moscow contemporary, Russian impressionist, Konstantin Korovin. The landscapes in which his characters find themselves echo those of the great 19^th century Russian landscape painter Isaac Levitan (1860-1900) for their lyrical, poetical and epic qualities. Tonally they are similar, especially the skies, with their smooth palette of pale creams, lilacs and blues with bold accents of salmon pink making the canvas glow. In ‘Na Zemlye Pokoi’, to a greater extent than perhaps in other works by the artist, the landscape offers an answer to the yearning of the human soul, and provides us on earth a kind of sanctuary.

fig. 1 – ‘Lisichka’, 1914, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
fig. 2 – ‘The Hermit’, 1888/9, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
fig. 3 – ‘Lel' (Spring), 1933, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
fig.4 – ‘In the Hills’, 1896, Museum of Russian Art, Kiev
fig. 5– ‘The River Belaya’, Nesterov Art Museum, Bashkir Region
fig. 6– ‘Costume Design for ‘Lel’ in ‘Snegurochka’, 1885, by Victor Vasnetsov