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 Imperial Theatres, the successor of the conscientious pedant Shishkov, and the pretentious Bocharov. Only in Russia can such strange things occur.

To "free" realists, whether or not dependent on the above-mentioned artists, belong: Braz, Kustodiev, S. Korovin, Pasternak, Arkhipov, and in part also the late Mary Yakunchikov, and Grabar. Braz is the representative in the field of portrait and realistic landscape of what is termed "kitchen." Braz "prepares" his pictures, and tries to give them a "savoury" and "juicy" colouring, and an agreeable pictorial surface. Braz would deserve the greatest success in our society, which looks at pictures mainly as wall decorations. If, however, such a society still exists in Russia, its taste has grown so coarse that it has become unable to appreciate the eminent qualities of Braz, who is a pleasant, correct, and at the same time a very conscientious artist—and gives its preference to works manufactured by Bogdanov-Byelsky, Sternberg, Kryzhitzky and Pisemsky.

Sergey Korovin (born in 1858) is a strange phenomenon among the plain, sane realists. In his themes he comes near the school of the sixties, but his attitude toward his subjects betrays the culture of a later, maturer epoch. In the same manner, his technique occupies a middle position between the "skill" developed