Page:Benois - The Russian School of Painting (1916).djvu/88

 free only in his mature age. He did not have the advantage of studying abroad, and his life was one of ceaseless misery and solitude, as he shunned his own rather coarse circle and had no access to higher society. The pupil of the most uneven of Russian painters, Shchukin, he borrowed from him the "pleasant" colouring and the soft stroke, which make Tropinin the heir of the eighteenth century school. But Shchukin could not give him either firmness or great technical knowledge. With Greuse, Tropinin has in common the choice of young, sentimentally pretty heads, and mellow, quiet colour tones. Unfortunately, Tropinin later on developed a cold and smooth manner, which, evidently, was more to the taste of his chief patrons, the Moscow merchants. However, with regard to local colour and costume his portraits of the thirties and forties are of considerable value, and in skill of characterisation many of them are quite excellent. In his genre portraits Tropinin is very much like Venetzianov. His "flower-girls," "lace-makers," and other pictures from the life of "Moscow grisettes" breathe a candour, homely, touching, and quite distinctive. This is the only Russian offshoot, weak and short-lived, of that branch of Romanticism which in France produced Béranger and Murger.

Kiprensky and Orlovsky may be looked upon as the