Bogdan Pavlovich Villevalde

Original canvas. The paint surface is fairly clean. There are fine lines of craquelure in places. UV light reveals areas of retouching along the edges and elsewhere. Unframed.
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Villevalde was commissioned to paint some of Russia's most dramatic victories of the century but when he was free to choose the subject, it was invariably that of the Patriotic War of 1812 and the advances of 1813-14. Immortalised by Tolstoy in the 1860s, Napoleon's defeat was even then 'in the days of our grandfathers', but in terms of scale - and also perhaps legitimacy - it was Russia's greatest victory of the century. Villevalde's fascination was fuelled further by Alexander Sauerweid, a fierce patriot who taught him at the Academy of Art alongside Karl Briullov.

 

Villevalde's paintings were mostly destined for Imperial or court collections, but grand commissions had drawbacks. Nicholas I famously would visit Villevalde's studio, chastising him for sacrificing detail to perspective, demanding that every button and epaulette should be visible. Moreover monumental battle scenes which accurately depicted complex military manoeuvres were not always to the taste of the emerging journal-reading public or critics, so in the 1880s and 90s Villevalde turned increasingly to smaller military-genre scenes. Unconstrained by absurdly precise whimsical Imperial instruction that fettered some of his large-scale paintings, these late works depicting the fringes of conflict are often the most skilful and affecting.