The Russian School of Painting
piquant ugliness, and in general to what it is customary in the artistic world to call by Hoffmann's phrase "scurrility." But sometimes Somov is as helpless as a child, unconsciously and against his own will, and this even in works where everything points to a tremendous skill, and to a consummate perfection of technique, a perfection unknown to the whole of Russian painting of the second half of the nineteenth century.
In virtue of all his merits and failings Somov may count together with Vrubel, upon one of the most prominent places in the history of Russian painting. It is highly probable that Somov's art, excessively spiced, suffocatingly perfumed, over-refined, and morbidly delicate as it is, will undergo a re-estimation in the future, but it can be safely predicted that no other artist of the beginning of the twentieth century has mirrored with greater faithfulness the peculiar charm of our super-refined epoch, which knows so much and believes so little. The very defects of Somov are but characteristic signs of the times: it is the reflection of the general senile decrepitude of our culture,—a decrepitude which has its immense horror and its most delicate fascination.
The third prominent Russian master is Malyavin. He is Repin's disciple, but he is to Repin as Goya is to Velasquez, or as Fragonard is to Watteau. The so-
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