The Eighteenth Century
wide in European and Asiatic Russia and who executed thousands of very common-place water-colour paintings, which are interesting only from the topographical viewpoint, would not perhaps be worth mentioning in the history of Russian art, if not for his water-colours and his coloured lithographs of Petrograd. As a matter of fact, even these discourage one by their childish design and poor technique, but the naive simplicity with which they are executed, the well-aimed character of the chosen points and, especially, their astonishingly just, lucid, and even poetical colour tones, assign them a modest, yet honourable place. There is in them the true mood of the Petrograd summer which is not devoid of a great and elusive charm.
Among all our "view-painters"—Maxim Vorobyov (1787–1855) was a real master and one of the most renowned artists of his times. In fact, Vorobyov is distinguished from all his colleagues by his admirable skill, the many-sidedness and the poetical quality of his conceptions. His aquarelles, modest, but executed with a great deal of taste, his oil paintings, somewhat tenuous in design and ineffective in colour, but nevertheless of a very regular execution,—all this shows an excellent schooling. Vorobyov, too, was a devotee of Petrograd; like Alexyeyev and Galaktionov,
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