Landscape and Free Realism
works of the brothers Chernetzov and Rabus. On the contrary, in its subsequent development, this current acquired a manneristic and superficial character, as evidenced in the works of S. Vorobyov, Bogolyubov, and Lagorio. The second current of our landscape painting presents from the purely artistic standpoint an incomparably greater interest. Its significance kept on growing gradually until toward the beginning of the nineties of the past century it assumed a domineering position in Russian painting.
M. N. Vorobyov himself occupies a middle position, like his teacher Galaktionov, and Semyon Shchedrin. He painted views of Petrograd, full of charming poetry, but together with these he produced a great mass of dry topographical "surveys." In his Palestine pictures he is the father of a long succession of painter-tourists, who spent their lives in sketching, in a superficial and hackneyed manner, all the notable places of the globe.
The art of Silvester Shchedrin (1791–1830) differs little from the landscape painting of his time. Neither a poet at heart, nor an ardent romanticist, he was nothing more than a "view-painter," who copied beautiful sites. Only his early Petrograd pictures approximated, in their poetical conception, the paintings of his uncle Semyon and of his comrade, M. Vorobyov.
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