The painting “Worldly prose” by Vasily Baksheev is distinguished by subtle psychologism and high emotional stress. Among the landscapes and portrait works, it occupies a special place. At first glance, the viewer witnesses a family drama, a conflict of two generations. A man, perhaps the head of the family, is offended by the tone of moralizing conversation.
P.N.Orlov has established himself as a portraitist, but in his works you can find several dedicated to everyday scenes from life. One of these works is the “Architectural Landscape.” The artist was an impressionable nature, everything was interesting to him. Born in the family of a poor miller and saving for a long time to pay for his education, Orlov appreciated ordinary household items and saw beauty in everything.
Another grandiose picture of Titian “Sisyphus” refers to a rather famous ancient Greek myth, which tells about how the most cunning of people able to deceive Death itself, Sisyphus revealed the secret of Zeus to another god without the permission of the latter, for which he had to be killed by Thanatos (Death itself ), which Zeus sent.
"Testing the strength of Jan Usmar" belongs to the brush of Grigory Ugryumov, known for his historical paintings. It was thanks to this work that the artist was awarded the title of academician. Today, this bright and dynamic canvas is part of the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. The plot is based on one of the stories of "Tales of Bygone Years", affecting the events of 992.
The outstanding artist of his time and his generation, Valentin Serov, lived and worked in the XIX-XX centuries. During his work, he wrote a lot of different paintings, but at first Serov was engaged in painting portraits and paintings on order. Due to his commissioned work, he became one of the most talented and outstanding portrait painters of his era.
The great artist Vasily Surikov was very fond of his native lands of Siberia. This was the reason for the creation of his works in the historical genre. Ermak’s struggle with the Tatars was a very interesting topic for the painter. The study “Cossacks in a boat” was created in 1892 in Krasnoyarsk. Later it became a fragment, written in 1895, of the painting “The Conquest of Siberia by Ermak”.
