Part II

There is something of the same emotional dynamite, as it were, in the first of Russia's major landscape painters, who grasped the possibilities, open to them in showing raw Russian nature. Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900) came from the Crimea and was brought up on the Black Sea. He might technically be described as a marine painter, since perhaps two-thirds of his immense output of mainly large-scale works deals with the sea. But he is a marine painter only in the sense that Turner was one too. He is essentially, like Turner, a painter of nature's extremes: of those conjunctions or convulsions, of the seasons, of the times of day, of snow and ice, altitude, depth, wind and sun, which produce extraordinary sights. He achieved his first big popular success with Daryal Gorge (1862). This presents one of Eurasia's grandest natural phenomena, the equivalent of the Yosemite Valley (which Bierstadt was painting at exactly the same time), in all its staggering depth and precipitous, fear generating drama. Aivazovsky loved these freaks of nature, just as Constable loved sluggish streams, rotten posts and rushy backwaters. He sought them out in Central Asia, where he went by horse and camel, like Bierstadt with his mule-train, to explore, pinpoint nature's extravagance and catastrophes, and record them.

The sea, and its unfathomable rages, had the same kind of appeal to Aivazovsky. The Maiia in a Gale (1893) is one of the best renderings of a storm at sea done in the nineteenth century. In scale and movement it reminds one of Turner. Yet it is in no way Turneresque: this is a direct description of force, power and dynamism, not atmosphere, chemistry and elemental minglings. Ship, sea and sky do not dissolve into one continuum of varying light and colour, as with Turner. They are distinct and embittered protagonists; they fight each other with ferocity. Indeed, Aivazovsky aimed at clarity, in almost exactly the same

36 Storm at Cape Aiya, 1875

Ivan Aivazovsky

manner as American marine artists like Lane. What he lacked, or repudiated, was their sense of calm. Next to storms at sea, he loved moonlight, because it produced a fresh set of dramatic circumstances which could be carried to the limits of credibility. Hence his spectacular The Black Sea at Night, a large-scale work whose sheer intensity makes the moonlighters of the West—Wright of Derby, for example, and Claude Vernet (1714-1789)—seem close to unaudacious.

However, it must be said that the principal actor in Russia's theatre of nature is neither sea nor mountain, gorge nor storm, but the forest. It is ubiquitous, endless, heartless and alarming always, but variously beautiful in its seasonal cycles. Again, one must go to the Tretyakov Gallery to examine how Russian painters coped with this overwhelming presence. The largest stretches of Russian forest were primarily of birch, and this with its white-silver bark gave the Russian painter spectacular opportunities to create light-effects. For the birch forest can never quite extinguish the light, even in its deepest recesses, and when the sunlight blazes in summer, each tree becomes a kind of mirror or intensifier of light. In 1879, when Arkhip Kuindzhi (1841-1910) exhibited his Birch Grove at the Academy in St Petersburg, his virtuoso presentation of light reflected off the birch trunks, against a background and foreground of deepest green, excited and puzzled spectators. They crowded round the canvas, not believing that the source of light came merely from the cunning used by Kuindzhi in heightening the natural chiaroscuro, insisting it was some kind of trick. Some Russian artists painted forests and nothing else their entire career, and argued that the knowledge to be thus gained was infinite. A group of them, known as 'The Wanderers', promoted forest lore almost to the status of an artistic religion. Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898) helped to found it in 1871. He had trained in Germany as well as in Moscow and was an amateur botanist of the most fanatical kind, accumulating masses of books and specimens, and meticulous drawings of plants (and insects), which would have delighted Ruskin. He was called 'the Book-keeper of the Leaves'.

Shishkin did the forest (pine as well as birch) in all seasons, often spending the night alongside his equipment to get twilight or dawn effects. His Pine Forest, Viatka Province (1872) shows high summer. Rain in an Oak Forest (1891) is an astonishing virtuoso performance, presenting spring in saturated moisture and seeping, slithering, wetness and mud, as the downpour falls from the misty sky into the pattering leaves. His Winter Pine (1891), inspired by a verse of Lermontov, is a crunchy, moonlit December scene, the lone pine almost tottering from its weight of snow. Winter, painted the year before (St Petersburg, Russian Museum) conveys the claustrophobia of deep snow in limitless fir forest. It should be added, however, that Shishkin, like some of the Americans, liked to break out of the enclosing forest and show the sheer breadth and depth of the great land. One of his earliest successes came in 1866 with Midday: Countryside Near Moscow, where tiny peasants with scythes walk near a cornfield under a towering cumulus sky which occupies four-fifths of the work. In Across the Vale (1883, Kyiv Museum), he produced a gigantic canvas showing a lone high oak against a background of endless plain through which a river slowly curves. He gets the same effect of immense depth and distance in On the Shore of the Gulf of Finland, using grey-blue seas and skies, and the serrated cliffs over the beach, tiny figures walking along them. But in his last work, Grove of Trees Like Masts (1898; both Russian Museum), he is back in the forest again, in total silence, still light, infinite, semi-darkness, and stillness.

TASKS