Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/137

 of culture. Less precious is "semi-cultural" popular art, because only slurred over by general culture, and least valuable are those works in which artists from the people endeavour to combine bits of general culture, of which they had tasted, with what they owe to their early education. As a result we have a vague, hybrid, compromising art, which has all the defects of its two component elements, rather than their merits.

Vasnetzov is a gifted, lively and impressionable artist. His energetic "Stone age," his decorative compositions, partly also his fairy-tale pictures,—the charm of which is marred by their size and their mawkish colours—sufficiently testify to a certain originality and, especially, liveliness, and impressionability of the master. Great is Vasnetzov's merit as a pioneer of neo-idealism, who came forward with his devotional canvases when all his colleagues sat at the feet of Proudhon and Chernyshevsky. But Vasnetzov's religious paintings, which made their appearance so opportunely in the reign of Alexander III, in the period of official Slavophilism, in the days of the celebrated "rebirth" of Russian Orthodoxy—this art is far from having that artistic importance which our society recently attributed to it. After all, Vasnetzov's religious painting is but a successful parody on the well established canons of