Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/83

 ; he preferred it to drawing. Yet, education is second nature. The Academy inoculated him not only with a practical knowledge of drawing, but also with a theoretical cult of it. This combination of a natural inclination for colour with a thorough scholastic training could have produced the most felicitous result,—that is, a truly great master, had only Kiprensky known toward what aim to direct his powers.

His misfortune consisted in that, though a possessor of great knowledge, he did not know what to apply it to. That is why his portraits are his best achievement, the most inspired and original part of his work. Here the subject-matter is supplied by nature, yet, strange as it may appear, he is freer in his portraits than in his "free" compositions, which his academic education taught him to approach with a stock of superannuated, dead ideas and patterns. Naturally, his best portraits are the portraits of himself, where his clients' demands were not in his way and where he could give free rein to his colouristic impulses. There exists a great number of these self-portraits, and none of them resembles the other,—a manifest proof that Kiprensky, like Rembrandt, was interested not so much in resemblance as in colour effects. The most curious ones are the two likenesses in the collection of E. G. Schwarz, which came originally from the collection of Tomilov, the