The Russian School of Painting
and pedantic in their definiteness of composition. It is true that some of their peculiarities indicate the artist's quickness and wit, but, on the whole, these compositions, too, leave the spectator absolutely cold and indifferent. In these pictures his dry manner of painting, his dull colours, and exceeding realism obscure the splendour of the poetical conception. The demands of his education and surroundings did not fan into a real flame the spark that smouldered in Kramskoy.
V. Vasnetzov, universally idolised up to recent times, is an interesting and big artist, but he cannot be looked upon as the real successor of Ivanov. His very aim: to reproduce the "purely Russian," that is the limited and almost ethnographical attitude toward Christ, is infinitely inferior to the lofty "all-human" ideals of Ivanov. Vasnetzov's humble birth was credited in his favour, but, it seems to us, it is in this very origin, in the manifest lack of culture by which this otherwise very intelligent artist is distinguished, that there lies the cause of the ineffectiveness of his art. Of course, popular art, pure and simple, is eternal, being the living utterance of a vast social organism. But its value and interest are the greater, the purer and more naive it is, and the more strongly there appears in it the element of peculiar, national civilisation,—however different this may be from the general con-
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