Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/87

 nevertheless, was really a poet and an artist. You find among his works caricatures ridiculing the snobbishness of Paul's reign and jeering at the faded grandeur of Catherine's age; you find also—long before Decamp—a great many Oriental types, and sundry most extravagant jokes in colour and line; and there are, in addition, portraits of the heroes of the Alexandrian epic, scenes from Shakespeare's tragedies, sensational landscapes, sketches of furious skirmishes and battles. Technically, many of these works stand comparison with drawings of old masters. Perhaps Orlovsky, too, was hindered in his development by the lack of understanding on the part of the society which surrounded him. It willingly pardoned him his entertaining pranks on paper, but it would never think of admitting that this "fooling" had a serious artistic value,—at any rate, a far higher value than all his academic exercises in noble style and all his timid plagiarisms of Dutch "parlour" pictures.

It is customary to mention in connection with Kiprensky's name that of Tropinin,—next to Kiprensky the best portraitist of the beginning of the nineteenth century. But the surname of the "Russian Greuse," bestowed on Tropinin, indicates with sufficient clearness that the two masters had very little in common. Tropinin (1776–1857), Count Morkov's serf, was set