Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/199

 something in the nature of a half-uttered word. The amazing maturity of his technique, a pictorial gift, and a serious view of art promised in him an excellent artist, a delicate painter and a poet, but his drawings and most of his paintings betray the fact that the youthful master was misled by the excessive praises of his fellow-painters and already entered the easy road of mannerism. Unlike Lebedev, Vasilyev's last works betray, more clearly than his first canvases, a pursuit of prettiness, and concessions to the bad taste of the public. At any rate, many aquarelles, drawings, and a few sketches in oil of this gifted artist probably played an important part in the development of our landscape technique, and present a great artistic value.

Here must be also mentioned B. D. Polyenov (born in 1844), whose merits in the field of landscape compel us to be more indulgent to his blunders in historical painting. His studies of the Moscow Kreml, his charming, genuinely poetical "Moscow Courtyard," and "Grandmother's Garden" were as significant for their time as Savrasov's "The Rooks Have Come." These pictures were the fountain-head of the poetic and pantheistic landscape which in literature is represented by Turgenev and Tyutchev. Despite the fact that their technique is not very good, they