VASILY POLENOV

 

Post-200 -by Gautam Shah

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture

Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov (1844-1927) was a very important realist painter in the history of Russian art. He began a systematic study of drawing in 1856. He had interest in history painting from the student days. But he also worked on landscape art. It was during the 1880-1890s that he achieved a balance between the two forms. He also embodied both European and Russian traditions of painting.

In 1876, he became an Academician, and in 1882-95 he was appointed a professor of landscape painting at the School of Art in Moscow. He visited Vienna, Munich, Venice, Florence, Naples, Middle East, Constantinople, Palestine, Syria and Egypt, and stayed in Paris for a long time. Due to his urban upbringing, he was fond of nature. He built a house at Borok, Tula, on his own design, as a ‘nest of artists’.

Polenov shows a mastery over the bright sun-light and figurative elements, which established a new fashion for landscape paintings. Some of the later paintings show brush strokes of impressionistic styles. He included architectural entities and elements as background setting in natures’ paintings. 

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GIUSEPPE BARISON

 

Post -199 By Gautam Shah

SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture

Giuseppe Barison (1853-1931) was a Trieste born, Italian painter and engraver. A grant, from the local municipality allowed him to spend two years in Rome. The Roman stay placed him in academic and classy stiffness. The world was moving to more lively art, but he remained bound to the 19^th C traditions. His early paintings included horses, historical compositions and military themes, though all rendered with care and precision.

Barison, in his paintings, did not show any extra ordinary effort, except depicting the truthful reality. His art had a feeling of peace and serenity. In Venice, he portrayed the small squares and narrow lanes. These scenes had good scenic composition and extra ordinarily placed human figures. The exile period during the WW-I, allowed him to paint coastal areas.

The coastal and marine art began to detach him from the academic stiffness. He gained a naturalistic flavour. He also began to draw portraits. This brought out the best of his talents.

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FRANÇOIS BOUCHER

 

Post 198 - Gautam Shah 

SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture 

François Boucher (1703-1770) was an artist with an elegant draftsmanship. He was called the Genius of the French Rococo period. His oeuvre consists of mythological Paintings, decorative allegories, and pastoral scenes, idyllic and voluptuous art on classical themes, large number of preparatory drawings and independent sketches in chalk.

Boucher was as a master of the genre scene. He was very prolific and a varied draftsman. He was gifted engraver and etcher. Who etched some 180 original copper-plates. His main contribution to Rococo painting was his re-invention of the pastoral art, a form of idealized landscape populated by shepherds and shepherdesses in silk dress, enacting scenes of erotic and sentimental love.

Boucher work was characterized by the ‘use of delicate colours, high-toned palette, gently modelled forms, facile technique, naturalism and light-hearted fanciful subject matter’.

Boucher worked in virtually every medium and every genre, creating a personal idiom that was widely reproduced in print form. His portrayal favours the riches and idyllic rural innocence with eroticism, passion and amor. He regularly used his own wife and children as models. He was highly adept at marketing his work, providing designs for all manners of decorative arts, from porcelain to tapestry.

Boucher became art faculty member in 1734, and promoted as Professor and then Rector of the Academy. He was an inspector at the Royal Gobelins and Beauvais tapestries (carpets and tapestries) Manufactory. He was also associated with royal porcelain factories. He was Premier Peintre du Roi (First Painter of the King) in 1765. He designed theatre costumes and sets.

Boucher worked out the overall composition of his major canvases, and then making chalk studies for individual figures, or groups of figures. He used chalk, oil and gouache for studies. To meet commercial demand, he made independent sketches. He also produced style of Chinoiserie art (8th C characterized by the use of Chinese motifs and techniques).

Boucher, in the later part of life, lost the preeminence in the art market, due to overproduction, sterility of his creativity, poor copying of his painting themes into tapestries and etchings and emergence of Neoclassicism.

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