The Russian School of Painting
Semyon Shchedrin (1745–1804) had no great talent. Some of his pictures and paintings in water colours are executed in an amateur-like and even childish fashion. His colours are dry and dark; the design is timid and betrays his lack of skill. Some of his works, however, are distinguished by haunting, although hardly artistic charm, and justify the fame he enjoyed among his contemporaries. Shchedrin knew how to handle a given landscape so as to produce a striking effect; he felt the fascination of fountains playing their jets among verdure, and he revelled in the favourite motives of the times, such as deserted nooks, exquisite meadows, white cottages mirroring themselves in crystalline ponds. At school he learned the now forgotten science of grouping landscape motives, and his naive attitude toward nature developed in him, to a certain extent, the sense of colour. His best works in the Gatchina and Pavlovo Palaces, when compared with Hubert Robert's productions, look like parodies on the works of the latter, yet they are not entirely devoid of decorative beauty and even of intimate gentle poetry.
Mikhail Ivanov (1748–1823) is a greater master than Shchedrin. His water-colour views of Tzarskoye Selo and of sites visited by Catherine and Poty-
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