Strange to say, Schischkin is stronger in his etchings than in his oil-paintings, the colors of which are always a little too dry. But his etchings, which I could enjoy in their first prints, thanks to the goodness of the senator Reutern in St. Petersburg, are real treasures in sentiment and character. He is, if one may express it so, the psychologist of the trees. A tree on the dunes is a whole tragedy from the lives of the pines.
Aiwasowsky, the virtuoso of the troubled sea, is more effective than the quiet Schischkin. His storms at sea, with their transparent waves, actually drive terror into the onlooker. The Black Sea has been the favorite object of his pictures. There all the furies seem to be let loose in order to frighten fisher and sailor. And these floods shine and shimmer; they are as if covered with a transparent light. Levitan, again, has understood the charm of the calm surface of a small body of water as no one else. His brush is dipped in feeling. The beauty of his pictures cannot be reproduced in words. He seems to have a special sense-organ for the shades of the atmosphere. It is a pity that he died so very young.
The collection of Vereschtschagin has now obtained a particularly enhanced value because of the awful death of the master. The Tretyakov Gallery has, with the exception of the Napoleonic pictures which ornament the Alexander Museum, almost the whole life-work of the artist. His work has only recently been universally appreciated. The power of the versatile man was astonishing; his philanthropic turn of mind and his epigrammatic spirit give spice to his pictures; but of him, first of all, perhaps, it might be said that he used his art for purposes foreign to it in spite of all artistic treatment. For it was seldom the artistic problem that charmed him. Only his Oriental color studies are to a certain extent free from ulterior purposes.
It is difficult to choose from this abundance of good masters, and particularly to name those whom one should know above the others. Pictures cannot easily be made so accessible as books, and the contents of a picture does not permit of being told at all. And so I content myself with mentioning again the names of Ryepin, Schischkin, Levitan, and Aiwasowsky, and then those of the portrait-painter Kramskoi, the landscape-painter Gay, and the master of genre painting, Makowski. And to any one whose path ever leads him to Moscow, a visit to the Tretyakov Gallery is most urgently recommended. A people which produces such artists in every field as the Russian has not only the right to the strongest self-consciousness, and to the general sympathy of people of culture, but, above all, it has the right to be respected by its rulers and not to be handled like a horde of slaves.