The Russian School of Painting
quite pleasant. There lingers on them the reflection of the never-fading beauty of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and although the reflection is very faint and misty, it has retained, to a certain degree, its enchantment. Whoever is able to delight in a "beautiful" composition, whoever can be moved by the unassuming beauty of interweaving rounded lines, will find pleasure—a somewhat unsavoury pleasure, perhaps—in the innumerable drawings of the two masters, which are treasured in our museums and private collections.
Along with Shebuyev and Yegorov must be mentioned Alexander Ivanov's father—the excellent draughtsman Audrey Ivanov (1775–1848). He was not untouched by the influence of the eighteenth century. The symbolical figure of "Glory" in his picture, "The Duel of Mstislav and Rededya" looks as if it had just left one of Rastrelli's plafonds. His Pechenyeg, so properly stretched at the feet of the "youthful citizen of Kiev," petrified in the race, is doubtlessly akin to the Marses of the baroco mythology. But his knowledge of the human body was, perhaps, greater than that of his more famous colleagues, especially of Shebuyev. The figures of the naked youths in the above-mentioned picture as well as the stroke, firm, and to a certain extent agreeable in its sureness and smoothness, reveal in the master a great fund of technical knowledge. But
64
