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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Venice School of Painting
The heritage of the Venetian school of painting is one of the most striking pages in the history of the Italian Renaissance. The “Pearl of the Adriatic” - a quaintly…

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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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Syrian landscapes
Most of the landscape compositions by Syrian artists are devoted to old Damascus and the village of Maaloula, located in a picturesque mountain area near Damascus. She became a source…

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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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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

Kanoplasta from Tanagra
The Greek words "tanagra", "tanagryanka" about a hundred years ago entered the Russian language. They are now used to denote everything fragile, feminine and plastic. The artist V. Serov invented…

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Hubert Robert - "Painter of Ruins"
Antique ruins, then reflected in the calm waters, then almost hidden by thickets of climbing plants, shrubs. Peaceful rural nature, almost always clear sky. Through the gaps of trees make…

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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…

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