Romanticism
forerunners of Russian Romanticism in painting. The rôle of the Russian Delacroix was played by an artist of the next generation, Karl Bryullov, who, while still at the Academy, manifested a natural gift amounting almost to genius, and who, even before his trip abroad, attracted the attention of connoisseurs. To reckon Bryullov among the romanticists is, to be sure, to force the account. The precepts of the academic school were too deeply rooted in him; moreover, by nature he was rather light-minded and external. But the cycle of subjects he treated, his own life, burned up in a sort of bacchanalian whirlwind, his yearning for high ideas and eternal glories amidst the welter of workaday prose, his intimacy with the best Russian poets, and, finally, his irresistible gravitation toward wildest colour effects,—all this makes us consider Bryullov a representative of that same current of European art, which in Western painting brought forth Géricault, Delacroix, Decamp, and many others. Unhappily, Bryullov's colossal talent could not fully unfold itself in the Russian academy or society, nor could his life in Rome further his development. His excessive arrogance, coupled with the lack of thoughtful penetration in his attitude toward his surroundings was also responsible for his failure to produce an art of all-human significance and eternal beauty. The French would even
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