Kramskoy painting "Mermaids" or a mystical dream

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Fantastic painting occupies a special place in the bouquet of paintings by Russian artists. This is due to our culture with many fairy tales and polytheistic beliefs. One of the artists who clearly caught the connection between the fictional and the real was Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy. In his canvases there is no obvious division into fantasy and true story, these two factors are smoothly intertwined and give the viewer a whole story. The principle of a certain nebula or even “dullness” of the surface, careful selection of images and soft colors give the same fabulousness inherent in the paintings of Ivan Nikolayevich. For example, we can definitely say that “Mermaids” is a painting by Kramskoy, its description coincides with the characteristics of other paintings by this author: mysticism is adjacent to calm nature. By the way, if we talk about realism, then we can see quite familiar landscapes, huts and houses with clearly drawn details.

Kramskoy: from clerk to painter

The artist was born in May 1837 inVoronezh province. His father was a clerk, so he wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. And so it happened. After graduation, Ivan worked as a clerk at the Duma in his city. But in 1853, his attention turned to other activities, he began to process photographic images, he was taught this by Tulinov, who was a fellow countryman of Kramskoy.

Thus began the path of the painter as an artist. Already in 1857 he entered the Art Academy in St. Petersburg. The success of the young man was so obvious that for one of the paintings Ivan Nikolaevich received a gold medal.

Among the works of the draftsman were portraits of famous people, with the help of which he got his hand in this genre, but his most famous painting is “Christ in the Desert”. She became the peak of Kramskoy's development in religious painting.

An unimaginable number of paintings and photographs were left to the heirs in memory of a wonderful artist who died of heart problems at the age of fifty.

Mystic painting “Mermaids”

Perhaps one of the most ardent lovers of mysticism in Russian painting is Kramskoy. The painting "Mermaid" has gathered around itself so many reckless opinions about her bad reputation that, unfortunately, it is impossible to list everything. The history of the work is connected, oddly enough, with Gogol and his story “May Night or the Drowned Woman”. According to popular rumor, drowned girls became mermaids after death, inviting travelers into their networks. It was them that the draftsman wanted to depict in the picture.

Why Gogol? As you know, Nikolai Vasilievich was also not averse to writing about something mysterious, even remembering “Viya” or “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, and Kramskoy re-read these works several times. Probably, this attraction to Gogol became the starting point in the field of fantastic painting. The artist wanted to convey the atmosphere of the May night in Ukraine in small details, hence the co-presence effect. As Kramskoy himself said, the picture of the “Mermaid” does not fully meet his requirements, because he so wanted to portray the light of the moon, but he did not succeed in “catching” it. Although we see how the cold light of the night luminary glides over the images of the mysterious mermaids. But this is only part of what the author himself conceived.

It was believed that mystical stories were dangerous, and if you write them off from the works of Gogol, then you can actually go crazy. Kramskoy even joked about this: “It’s good that with such a plot I didn’t finally break my neck, and if I didn’t catch the moon, then something fantastic happened.”

And indeed, in galleries and exhibitions, she could never find a place. The paintings next to the “Mermaids” were falling, and a barely audible singing could be heard from the room and it was cool. But after the canvas was hung in a far corner, far from the sun, the supernatural stopped, probably the mermaids were too hot in the sunlight.

The picture is like a believable fantasy dream

But no matter what Kramskoy himself says, the picture of the “Mermaid” was a success, because on many it produced a strongThe impression, however, is not always positive. This is due to the fact that the artist wanted to depict on the canvas. Both the faces of the drowned women and nature itself seem to evoke unpleasant dreary thoughts.

The expression on the girls' faces betrays sadness in life, dreams of the past, and hopelessness. The whole picture is a symbol of deep sadness. Unusual images of mermaid girls are immediately striking. They do not have tails, as you can see, they move very well on their own two on the ground, only the viewer gets the impression of weightlessness, as the white robes of the undines make them look like ghosts.

Although I was not entirely satisfied with the work of Kramskaya, the painting "Mermaids" was appreciated by professionals: many art critics equated this work with a magical dream, everything is so realistically depicted on it.

Pushkin's score

The sun of Russian poetry spoke extremely positively about Ivan Nikolayevich's painting. What amazed Pushkin in Kramskoy's "Mermaid"? Yes, everything is the same as all connoisseurs of good creativity. He felt the atmosphere that the author was trying to convey, he admired the shades of mood, because Alexander Sergeevich saw here playfulness, dreaminess, and sadness. In the images of girls, he caught the real thing, which, alas, sometimes you will not find in living people. It was this kind of psychologism, not usually characteristic of portrait painters, that captivated Pushkin.

This work turned the world of artists, ithad a huge impact on the subsequent work of the same author, as well as on the work of his followers. As Kramskoy wanted, the painting “Mermaids” caught its moonlight, thanks to the competent use of folklore and culture of the Russian people on the canvas. Many schoolchildren consider the reproduction of the work as an illustration for Gogol's "May Nights", and then write their impressions of what they saw. However, an essay based on the painting “Mermaids” by Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoy requires not only the ability to correctly express one’s thoughts, but also to understand the feelings of not only the characters, but also the artist himself.