Venetian landscape painters of the 18th century
By the beginning of the 18th century, the once mighty Venice had lost its significance as the political center of the Mediterranean, becoming a peculiar center of pilgrimage. Rich travelers…

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Anton Refrigier - born in Moscow
Refrege was born in Moscow in the year of the first Russian revolution. This fact would seem irrelevant to the biography of an American artist: after all, his father took…

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"The Adoration of the Magi" by Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo Da Vinci
In March 1481, the monks of the Florentine monastery of San Donato and Scopetto turned to the notary Pietro of Vinci with a request to find an artist who could…

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Honore Fragonard - "Solar Brush Provence"
Attraction to the poetry of life, its emotional richness distinguishes Fragonard among the brilliant artists of France of the XVIII century. The destiny of the master initially developed happily. Even…

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Diego Rivera - the great Mexican painter
When the Great October Socialist Revolution took place in Russia, a revolutionary struggle was going on in Mexico for seven years. Armed peasants opposed the dictatorship of the rich and…

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direct observations

“Denial of confession” by Ilya Repin

The man was brought to execution. After several months of imprisonment, he was pale. Around the roaring crowd.

– Villain, crazy! In the king himself shot!
– God saved his majesty!

The simple women, with their hands on their cheek, with their eyes full of tears, looked at the young man who lived to the last minute. Continue reading

The Unknown by Ivan Kramskoy

At the end of the 1860s, in the period when the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions was born, a curious incident occurred in the workshop of Artel of artists. He is described by I. E. Repin in the book “Far near”: “One morning, on Sunday, I came to Kramskoy … From a troika-sleigh that arrived, a group of artel artists-artists with cold frost on fur coats fell into the house beautiful woman I was just dumbfounded by this wondrous face, the height and all proportions of the black-eyed… In the general turmoil, chairs quickly boomed, easels moved, and the general hall quickly turned into a study class. Continue reading

“Boris Godunov” and “Vasily Shuisky” by Ivan Shtenglin

In the middle of the 18th century, the interest of the Russian society in national history increased. Ivan Shtenglin, a master from Augsburg, Germany, who worked in Russia, completed from 1742 to 1780 a series of engraved portraits of Russian tsars. Among them are the images of Boris Godunov and Vasily Shuisky, the images of which subsequently attracted the attention of Pushkin. Continue reading

Fritz Kremer: “I had the good fortune to create many monuments that stand on the street”
The essence of understanding of the creative tasks of Kremer is to appeal to the broad masses of the people. “I feel it my duty,” says the artist, “to speak…

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"The Battle of San Romano" by Paolo Uccello
In the famous museums of Europe - the Louvre. Uffizi, the London National Gallery - stored three paintings by Florentine artist Paolo di Dono, nicknamed Uccello. Created in 1456-1457, they…

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Giacomo Manzu - Coast of Truth
Creativity Mantsu is a surprisingly natural synthesis of truth, clarity of artistic ideas and originality of the visual image. His method is truly realistic, but this is realism, say, not…

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