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James Whistler: “I am an artist and“ born ”in Petersburg”
James Whistler, an Anglo-American artist, was born July 11, 1834 in Lowell, the industrial city of the United States. Staying in Russia largely affected the formation of his talent. Whistler arrived in St. Petersburg as a teenager in the fall of 1843, when his father, a railway engineer, was invited by the tsarist government to build a railway that was supposed to connect the two capitals.
The years of childhood and adolescence, spent by the future artist in Russia, are the most cloudless and bright years in his full shocks of life. Continue reading
Vincent van Gogh in Holland
In 1879, when the epidemic of typhoid fever and fever in a multitude mowed people, Borinage’s miners marveled at the young lord, who fearlessly avoided the infected shacks, nursing the sick and maimed. This man was Vincent Van Gogh. Traveling over half of Europe, he ended up as a missionary at the coal mines. When the disaster at the mine was followed by a massive explosion of indignation of the miners, Vincent, their defender, entered into open conflict with the administration. “For almost two years,” he wrote bitterly about this to his brother, “I had to go through something in Borinage that did not look like a pleasure walk.” The unrest of the miners was suppressed, and the obstinate preacher was denied a seat. Continue reading
Two portraits of the actress Strepetova
There are destinies that strike the imagination with unusualness and inner completeness — such is the life of Pelageya Antipevna Strepetova (1850–1903), difficult and bright, full of dramatic turns. At the age of seven she first appeared on the stage. She was not yet fifteen, when she became a professional artist. And after a while rumors about her brilliant game began to spread throughout Russia. The very first performances of the provincial actress on the stages of Moscow and St. Petersburg literally stunned the theater audience, gave rise to the sincere admiration of some and the same sincere hostility of others. Continue reading
