Vasili Dmitrievich Polenov, 1844-1927

Romanov, G.B., Tovarishchestvo peredvizhnikh khudozhestvennykh vystavok, 1871-1923, St. Petersburg, 2003, ill. page 193
Society for Travelling Exhibitions, 1869-1899, letters and manuscripts, Moscow, 1987, p.516

Vasili Polenov was one of Russia’s most faithful adherents to plein air painting. Developed in France by the Barbizon school, this approach paved the way for Impressionism with its emphasis on an authenticity of vision, prompting artists to experiment more with colour and light effects.  Venice can be seen as one of the most important landscapes painted by Polenov outside Russia.

Vasili Polenov trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg during the 1860s.  This was period which saw a revolution in art practice. In 1864 a group of the most talented artists had walked out of the Academy in protest against conservatism in the selection of appropriate subject matter set by their tutors.   In 1871, the year of Polenov’s graduation, the progressive peredvizhnik exhibiting society was formed to offer artists a new platform for the exhibition and sale of their paintings and this gave them significantly more autonomy and creative licence.  Polenov did not associate with this group until much later, in 1878 when he began to exhibit in their itinerant shows.  By this time, he had travelled much in Western Europe and absorbed new influences from study trips around Germany, Italy and France.  It was in Normandy that he became most convinced of the expressive potential of plein air painting which became increasingly central to his art.  Painted in 1897, Venice is wholly remote in style from the artist’s early academic training, and both subject matter and style are Western European.

Views of Venice feature as a relatively small category in the history of Russian art, although Italy has played an important role throughout the centuries.  In the early 1800s it was to Rome primarily and the south of Italy that Russian artists travelled on their academic scholarships, thereby establishing an important tradition on the walls of the St. Petersburg Art Academy of Roman vistas and townscapes.  Venice was more the preferred location for marine painters, such as Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky with his numerous scenes of boats moored in Venice by night and day, and later Alexei Bogoliubov, whose paintings can be compared with the offered lot for their plein air approach and light tonality.  Of the younger generation born in the 1870s, Konstantin Gorbatov painted Venice and other Italian coastal scenes most frequently.

The offered lot is a highly finished and important composition from a series he painted of Venetian views and architecture in 1897.  A small scale sketch of the same view is located in the Polenov Museum, Russia (see fig 1) as is another sketch of Venetian rooftops (see fig 2).  Closer in scale and finish to the offered lot is a composition titled “Venice” in the Glinka Museum of Music History, formerly in the collection of the Russian conductor Golovanov.  According to an unpublished list of works compiled by the artist, in 1897 he painted a minimum of three variations of this subject, including one for the collector Saava Mamontov.  Clearly it was a composition which the artist himself rated highly.

Although the product of traditional plein air practice, the real significance of Polenov’s Venice lies beyond.  The treatment of the brushstrokes of the water reaches a level of modernity that is hard to find elsewhere in the artist’s work.  If we examine his paintings which feature lakes and rivers we usually see water depicted in large blocks of colour subordinate to the overall landscape.  Here the water attracts our primary gaze and sets the tone; even the masts seem to move to the rhythm of the water.  The naked canvas shines through in the left-hand side and there are accents of impasto and bright colour.  The painting appears to capture a moment in time and this bears the hallmarks of French Impressionism.