Painting. Russian artists. Mikhail Nesterov (1862-1942)

Mikhail Vasil'yevich Nesterov, an outstanding Russian painter, was born in Ufa. From 1877 to 1881 and again from 1884 to 1886 he studied at Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architec¬ture. His teachers were the realist painters Vassily Perov and Illarion Prynishnikov. Between 1881 and 1884 he worked under Pavel Chistyakov at the Academy of Arts, St. Petersburg. At the estate of Savva Mamontov at Abramtsevo Nesterov met the most inf¬luential painters of Russian Art Nouveau. He sought to combine this style with a deep Orthodox belief: however, in his desire to revive religious art he was influenced more by French Symbolism, particu¬larly, by Bastien-Lepage, than by old Russian icon painting. All Nesterov's canvases are marked by a lyrical synthesis between the figures and their landscape surroundings, as in the Hermit, of 1889, which represents the stooped figure of an old man against the northern landscape of stunned trees and still water. The subject of the large oil painting Vision of Young Bartholomew, of 1889-90, is the legendary meeting of the young Bartholomew (the future Russian Saint Sergius of Radonezh) with a monk who prophesies a glorious future for him. The simplified outlines and muted colours of the Abramtsevo landscape recall the works of the French artist Pu-vis de Chavaunes, which fascinated Nesterov during his trip to Paris in 1889.

In the 1880s-90s Nesterov created a great number of murals for churches. For example, he decorated the new church of St.Vladimir in Kiev, which had been built in the old Byzantine style in 1882.

After 1900 he made portraits of the outstanding personalities of his day, including the writer Lev Tolstoy, of 1907 and the physiologist Ivan Pavlov, of 1935, the sculptor Vera Mukhina, of 1940. Nesterov shows the sculptor at work on a plaster model, which she moulds on a diagonal. It reinforces the effect of energy and differs from the portrait of the scientist Pavlov, who is depicted in profile in a horizontal format that emphasises the quite processes of contemplation. Nesterov's most ambitious and large-scale pre-revolutionary painting was In Rus (The Heart of the People, of 1916). It was an attempt to present a generalised image of Russia on the eve of terrifying irrevocable changes.
 

Literature: Book "Russian art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva