Petr Petrovich Vereshchagin

Acquired by the parents of the present owner in the 1980s

Possibly St Petersburg, the Imperial Academy of Arts, 1874

Possibly F.Bulgakov, Nashi khudozhniki, St Petersburg, vol.1, 1890 (reprinted 2002), p.87 listed under works for 1874

Original canvas on possibly the original stretcher. There is a canvas patch to the centre of the bottom edge on the reverse. There are frame abrasions along the edges and a few tears to the tacking edges. There is craquelure throughout the paint surface, particularly visible in the sky. The craquelure is slightly raised, but stable, in places. There is surface dirt and the varnish has discoloured. Inspection under UV light reveals some old retouching to the right of the figure in the foreground, which corresponds to the patch on the reverse, as well as some minor retouching along the edges.
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Vereshchagin spend the winter of 1873-1874 in Tiflis after travelling through the Caucasus following the course of the river Rioni, according to the report of the Imperial Academy of Arts for that year. ‘He painted around 40 works, some of which were exhibited at the annual Academy exhibition, at the Society for the Enrichment of the Arts and the Caucasian Society for the Arts. Two works were sent by the Academy for exhibition in London’ (The report of the Imperial Academy of Arts, 4 November 1873 – 4 November 1874, St Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Arts, 1875, p.45). In the exhibition guide for the 1874 exhibition at the Imperial Academy a number of works are listed: Square in Tbilisi (no.16), Street in Tbilisi (no.17), Tbilisi (no.136 and 137). The outstanding quality of the present work makes it highly likely it was among those included in the Academy exhibition.

The exoticism of the Caucasus, and Tiflis in particular, made it an extremely attractive destination for a number of Russian writers and painters, Romantic or otherwise. It was a highly cosmopolitan city during the 19^th century, populated by Armenians, Turks and Azeris and a hub of trade, as Vereshchagin’s bustling street scene implies. In his earlier Journey to Arzrum (1835), Pushkin more than once notes the high prices of this busy metropolis, as well as vividly describing the unfamiliar heat and exoticism of the streets:

‘Built on the river Kura, Tiflis is surrounded by rocky mountains which protect the city from winds on all sides. As a result, the burning mountains don’t so much heat up the air as set it boiling… Its very name Tbiliskalar even means the Hot City. Much of the city is built in the Asiatic style, with low houses and flat rooftops. The northern part of the city is more European in its architecture and a number of squares are beginning to be built in that area. The bazaar is divided into several sections and the rows of stalls are full of Turkish and Persian wares, relatively inexpensive, not that anything here is particularly cheap. Weapons from Tbilisi are prized across the East...’

In the present work, painted 40 years or so later, Vereshchagin’s ethnographic eye is caught by these same elements – the mixture of Oriental and Western architecture, flat roofs and Italianate balconies; the weapons trader in the lower right corner; the wealth of goods being sold – cloth, pots, carpets, hats. Tiflis’ fairy-tale atmosphere had inspired a colourful cityscape by Ivan Aivazovsky a few years earlier (fig.2) and the architecture of the city was irresistible to Ilya Repin when he visited the city in 1881 (fig.3), but Vereshchagin is unusual among Russian landscape painters of the period in balancing the Romantic with the realistic, and the present work falls somewhere between the interpretations of these two artists.

Intent on recording local detail across the wildly varied landscapes of the Russian Empire, Vereshchagin travelled impossible distances from Moscow and St Petersburg to Revel, Nizhny Novgorod, Kiev, Perm, Pskov, Kazan, the Urals, Vitebsk, Crimea, the Caucasus and beyond. The St Petersburg Academy of Arts trained him well in perspective drawing and in painting plein air panoramas, but interested as Vereshchagin was in Russia’s great vistas and landmarks, it is apparent from the most cursory overview of his oeuvre that he was equally interested the life of the local population, if not more so – the bustle of the streets, the traders, gentry, clerics, children – the everyday hum which enliven perspectives from Nevsky Prospect (fig.4) to Tiflis alleyways, to give the contemporary spectator a real sense of life in the far-flung cities which they would very likely never see first-hand.

Orientalism was an increasingly prevalent genre across Europe during this period, and Vereshchagin was not alone among Russian artists in succumbing to the lure of the East. At around the time Vereshchagin was exploring Georgia, Konstantin Makovsky and his brother Nikolai were travelling in Egypt, following on from Aivazovsky’s visit to Cairo for the opening of the Suez canal. It is curious to note the similarities between Cairo and Tbilisi seen through the eyes of these northern Russians – their intense interest in street life for example, foreign garb, architectural ornament, and above all, colour.