Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/86

 band of jugglers, service in the army in the capacity of a private, and the like. In Petrograd he found numerous patrons and admirers. A pupil of Norblin de la Gourdine,—who had taken up his residence in Warsaw and was one of the best French draughtsmen of the eighteenth century,—Orlovsky, nevertheless, completely broke off with Fragonard's exquisite style. He gave himself up to caricatures and grotesque devices, and he sketched untiringly everything ugly that fell under his eye. He seemed to have taken as his motto the words "Le beau c'est le laid," long before "Jeune-France" inscribed them on its banner.

Orlovsky must not be judged from his pictures. Most of them are dull studies from nature, servile imitations of Potter and Wouwerman, aimed at pleasing the Russian patrons, who were desirous of having specimens of the work of our "Russian Wouwerman." The real Orlovsky appears only in his drawings, sketches, aquarelles, gouaches and pastels. It is true that he is very uneven in them. There are among them dull, commonplace landscapes, coarse and hackneyed, rough sketches, and so on. But if this accidental portion of his œuvre is discarded, there remains a sufficient number of works in which Orlovsky appears with all the foibles and fads of a flippant adventurer, whom one would take either for a quack or for a buffoon, but who,