Vereshchagin, The War Painter.
By A. Yarmolinski.
It is told that when Vereshchagin showed his famous picture cycle, "Napoleon's retreat from Moscow," in Berlin, in 1882, Kaiser Wilhelm II. visited the exhibition and made an observation which, in the light of modern events, acquires a strange significance. After looking long, it is said, at a canvas which represented Napoleon tramping heavily in the snow, he turned aside and said thoughtfully: "And, in spite of that, there will still be men who will want to govern the world. But they will all end like this." He is credited also with a remark that these picture are "our best war insurance." Alas! Vereshchagin's canvases, like so many other spiritual citadels of mankind, have so far proved powerless against the hosts of evil. Yet it is true that the paintings of the great Russian artist are a protest, unequalled in pathos and power, against the horrors of war, a silent sermon written in colors, a most tragic "De Profundis" born of a great mind. And it is well to evoke his memory in these days when the cannons have hushed the nobler tones of the human voice, in these sorrowful days when the Furies of War are riding the Old World and the mouths of nations are bloody with the curb.
Chekhov says, in some place, that the best description of the sea he knows of, is that made by a little boy in four words: "The sea was big." One is tempted to describe our artist after the fashion of that boy. For, indeed, Vereshchagin was big, a huge body housing a great soul. He reminded those who had known him of the legendary "bogatyrs" sung in the ancient hero-ballads. His capacity for work, and his endurance, were almost superhuman, and the artistic legacy he left is colossal. Our civilized life was too narrow for him, and he felt uneasy in the cities of men. Of Tartar extraction, on his mother's side, he was possessed by the nostalgia of the distant, and by the nomadic spirit of his ancestors, who, in ages bygone, had swept over the great Russian plain. He travelled far and wide, especially in the East, whose sumptuous majesties attracted him irresistibly. There was something elemental and primitive about this great painter. He began his studies in the Academy of Arts, Petrograd, and in Paris, under Gerome. But he soon exchanged his Parisian studio for a Kirghiz tent, and it was
