Konstantin Somov’s Early Works and Impressionism: A New View on the Issue

The article reveals literary (Emile Zola’s novel “L’Œuvre”, Richard Muther’s work “History of Painting in the 19th Century”), literary and artistic (magazines “Mercure de France”, “L’Ermitage”, “La Revue Blanche”, “La Plume”) and artistic (exhibits of the French art exhibition of 1896) sources of Konstantin Somov’s acquaintance with the art of French impressionism at the beginning of his independent activity (before leaving for Paris in the late 1890s). There are also identified sources of phenomena in his work that are similar to impressionism only externally. These issues become the subject of special consideration for the first time. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it first reveals that the artist did not address to impressionism in the period before his departure to France, as it has been long believed. To study the tasks set, the article involves sources of personal origin (letters and diaries of K.A. Somov and his friend A.N. Benois), as well as A.N. Benois’s articles of the 1890s, published on the pages of the magazine “World of Art”. The author comes to the conclusion that K.A. Somov did not turn to the artistic method of the impressionists in his work at that time, since the information he had been able to get from the identified sources was of a verbal and theoretical nature. Black-and-white reproductions of impressionist paintings in literary and art magazines and in Muther’s “History of Painting in the 19th Century” had not provided sufficient information for the artist. The phenomena similar to impressionism in Somov’s works are based on the study of nature, the heritage of the old European artists, the art of the Barbizonians, J.-F. Millet, W. Turner.

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