The Russian School of Painting
the Tretyakov Gallery, and the portrait of Countess Rumyantzev in the Museum of Alexander III. The latter work, dated 1764, corroborates, by its coarseness and simplicity, our estimate of Antropov as an energetic and highly independent man. Incomparably weaker are his portraits of the Czars, in which the artist, unable to paint from nature, had to have recourse to other people's data. Having neither virtuosity nor European schooling (he was a pupil of A. Matvyeyev, of the icon painter Vishnyakov and of Karavacci) he helplessly heaped up in these portraits all sorts of details, borrowing them from the works of Tocqué, Grot and Develis. Of greater interest are his icons, preserved in the church of St. Andrew at Kiev.
We do not possess enough documents to form a complete judgment as to what "Shuvalov's" Academy of Arts really was. It seems to have been something in the nature of a large art studio, where almost mature men were admitted, and where the teaching process was more or less free. In keeping with the purely practical spirit of Peter the Great's educational reforms, the aim of the Academy was not "to educate men," but "to form artists." It is natural, then, that what the Academy produced was a number of masters of considerable technical skill. The following artists became prominent: in architecture, Bazhenov, Starov and Ivanov;
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