Marianne McLeod Gilchrist (University of St Andrews), Peter and the Painters: Images of the Petrine Era in Russian Historical Painting
In the preface to her book, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian Fiction (1979), Xenia Gasiorowska writes: "The reign of Peter the Great is a watershed in Russian history, and his place in it may be considered unique. No historical personage inspired such a rich anecdotic lore, none is accorded so many works of scholarship and fiction, few are so widely known ..." In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the life and reign of Peter I also provided the subject matter for a large number of historical paintings. These pictures reflect changes in Peter's image and in Russian perceptions of the past and present as clearly as any literary developments.
The Petrine period still causes controversy among historians in Russia and the West It was an era of considerable social and political change, and a cultural conflict was symbolised in the rise of Peter's new Baltic capital, the Dutch-named Sankt-Piterbuikh, at the expense of the old capital Moscow. The image of the First Emperor himself was as ambivalent as the legacy of these changes. The 'Reformer-Tsar' was also labelled a tyrant: the 'Father of the Fatherland', a filicide; Peter 'the Great', an 'Antichrist'. Behind these extreme polarisations lies Peter's own extreme personality, providing substance to support these contradictory claims.
The official image which emerged in Peter's lifetime can be seen at its most laudatory in works such as 'The Taking of Azov', which fuses the icon tradition with that of Western Baroque allegory, and in J.G. Tannauer's 'Peter I at the Battle of Poltava' (both GRM). Amigoni's 'Peter the Great and Minerva' 1732-4 (Hermitage) also reflected this view of him as a quasi-divine hero. The reign of Catherine II saw further development of this idealised image, as in Falconet and Collet's 'Bronze Horseman', unveiled 1782, Catherine, trying to legitimise her right to the throne, was eager to emphasise continuity between Peter's reforms and her own 'Enlightened Despotism'.
The official heroic image reached its height under Nicholas I, as his conservative ideology coincided with the flourishing of Academic historical painting. It is exemplified by works such as Steuben's 'Peter the Great in Childhood, Saved by His Mother from the Fury of the Strel'tsy'. 1827 (Valenciennes; also, 1830, GRM), and Shamshin's 'Peter the Great at Lakhta', 1844 (GTG).
However, by the mid-nineteenth century, the images of Peter and his time presented in art and literature were becoming more equivocal. Contributory factors included the death of Nicholas I in 1855, followed by a comparative relaxation of censorship, the rise of Slavophilism; a wider rediscovery and reassessment of pre-Petrine Russian history and culture. There was also a liberal challenge to the Petrine cult from Herzen, who came to see in Peter the founder of the autocracy and bureaucracy of his own time.
In art, this more critical view emerged in the historical paintings of the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions, or Peredvizhniki formed in 1870. Independent of the Academy, Peredvizhnik artists were able to solicit patronage from the new money of business and industry, rather than from the court Ñ an important factor in freeing their treatment of historical themes from the influence of court ideology.
Nevertheless, images critical of Peter continued to co-exist with the official, positive interpretation of him. In the first Exhibition of the Peredvizhniki, which opened in Petersburg in November 1871, two contrasting paintings on Petrine subjects were shown. Miasoedov's 'The Grandfather of the Russian Fleet' (Arts Museum of Uzbekistan, Tashkent) epitomises the official tradition with its sympathetic treatment of young Peter's discovery of the old boat at Izmailovo. In contrast, Ge's 'Peter I Interrogates Tsarevich Aleksei Petrovich at Peterhof (GTG) attracted critical controversy. The artist - a friend of Herzen and later a disciple of Tolstoi - had chosen a historical subject which had been heavily censored during Nicholas I's reign. He treated it with a degree of psychological insight and subtlety which allowed a variety of interpretations. Nevertheless, the composition's debt to Honthorst's 'Christ before Caiaphas' (Hermitage) carried typological implications disturbing to those used to seeing Peter as Saviour or Strastoterpets (as in Shamshin's 'Peter at Lakhta'). By indicting the Father of the Fatherland as a filicide, the image raised questions about the relationship of any autocrat with his wider family of subjects.
Ge's painting marked a turning point in historical paintings on Petrine themes. Not only did it present, in some readings at least, an unsympathetic impression of Peter, but it also gave equal attention to a character usually relegated to a subordinate, negative role Ñ in this case Aleksei. In 1879, Repin also took up a previously neglected character as his protagonist in Tsarevna Sophia Alekseevna in the Year after Her Imprisonment in the Novodevichii Convent, during the Execution of the Strel'tsy and the Torture of All Her Servingwomen in 1698' (GTG). This was a bold choice, given that the earlier nineteenth century had tended to treat Sophia as a scheming villainess. However, the rise of interest in women's rights and the depiction of strong female characters in literature gave her a contemporary relevance. Repin was aware, too, of more positive historical reassessments of Peter's predecessors: he was more sympathetic towards their gradual reforms than to the effects of Peter's haste.
Surikov's three major paintings - The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy' 1881, 'Menshikov at Berezov' 1883, and 'Boiarynia Morozova' 1887 (all GTG) - broadened the frame of reference, creating a less court-centred view of the effects of reform. They offer a profound commentary on the divisions in Russian culture and society heralded by the Schism of 1666 and increased by the Petrine reforms. Surikov amplified Repin's criticism that Westernisation had created an elite alienated from its own cultural heritage, a heritage only being rediscovered and appreciated now that it was under threat from increased urbanisation and industrialisation. He drew upon the cultural tensions in his own life Ñ between his traditional Siberian Cossack background, where he had first learned the stories he depicted from oral tradition and the Westernised world of art and literature within which he worked. These paintings remain emotionally and morally somewhat ambivalent
In Surikov's wake, the revival of interest in folk art and more widespread nationalistic sentiment produced a different approach to historical painting. In many respects, Andrei Riabushkin and Sergei Ivanov can be regarded as successors of Shvans, the short-lived but influential historical genre painter of the 1860s. They were drawn towards pre-Petrine subjects as much on aesthetic grounds as for any ideological reasons. Both depicted Strel'tsy subjects, but generally avoided sensational subject-matter.
In contrast, the Petersburg-based members of Mir iskusstva concentrated upon the themes drawn from their environment, and reestablished Peter himself as a central figure in historical painting. However, there is a grotesque element in the fin de siécle representations of Peter by Benua and Serov, not unrelated to his literary image at the dme. Both ardsts were acquainted with the writer, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, whose apocalypdc Symbolist novel Antikhrist: Petr i Aleksei (1905) drew attention to some of Peter's more bizarre and sinister aspects.
Benua's association with Merezhkovskii extended to the staging of the dramatised version of the novel, 'Tsarevich Aleksei', at the Bol'shoi Drama Theatre in Petrograd in 1920. Benua designed costumes and sets, and also co-directed the producdon. The element of masquerade and ardfice is particularly strong in Benua's 'The Summer Garden in die Time of Peter the Great', 1902. Benua also illustrated Pushkin's Bronze Horseman several times between 1903 and 1922. 'Peter I on the Shore of the Gulf of Finland' 1931 (Benua Family Museum, Peterhof) derived from die earlier illustrations, emphasises the Tsar's fixed resolve and isolation.Serov's 'Peter I on a Hunt' 1902 (GRM) set the tone for his later Petrine subjects, which are far from idealised and do not shrink from depicting Peter's bizarre sense of humour. His 'Peter I' 1907 (GTG), based on Rastrelli's wax effigy of the Emperor, unites the heroic and grotesque elements of his character: visually, it is both alarming and absurd. 'Peter I at Monplaisir' and 'The Great Eagle Cup' 1910-11 further develop this characterisation. 'The Great Eagle Cup' (State Picture Gallery of Armenia, Erevan) would have been inconceivable as an artistic depiction of Peter fifty years previously, depicting as it does Peter's sordid, sadistic party 'amusements'.
In 1912-16, in Peterburg, Belyi brought to life die Bronze Horseman and the mysterious 'tall companion' of the Flying Dutchman in the setting of the 1905 revolution. The same atmosphere, combining the disturbing with humour and impending apocalypse, underlies the most powerful of Serov and Benua's visual images. It conveys something which the earlier artists, in their images of the Petrine era, did not: the incipient madness, not of Evgenii, but of the Bronze Horseman, Peter himself.
The Tsar-Reformer and the Antichrist The image of Peter I in art, as in literature and history, shifts between these polarities: so do the interpretations of these images by critics and cultural historians. The Stalinist period saw a revival of the Petrine cult, similar to that of Nicholas Is reign, which brought Peter's image to the cinema screen. It also produced further critical reinterpretadons of the historical paintings examined above.
As Russia moves into a post-Communist era, with St Petersburg restored again, these paintings continue to influence popular images. The new wax museum in the Orangery at Peterhof contains a tableau based on Ge's picture, in which Peter and Aleksei are frozen in mid-confrontadon. The statue of Peter by the emigré Shemiakin, erected in 1991 outside the Peter and Paul Cathedral suggests a return to Serov's Rastrelli-inspired grotesque, tyrannical giant. At the same time, a Kneller-type, attractive young Peter appears in commercial art, advertising banks and computing ventures, as a symbol of technological progress and openness to the West It will be interesting to see which images prevail, and what new ones are created.