Paintings and painters

Art has always been a way of understanding the world and expressing feelings and emotions. There are many different forms of art and painting is only one of them.

Horace said that a «picture is a poem without words» and indeed it is so. Throughout centuries many techniques have developed to allow artists to transform their feelings into images on canvas.

Russian painters represent Russian art which is in many ways unique and has always impressed people around the world. It originates from the world-known icon-painters, the most renowned of whom is Andrey Rublyov.
Many Russian painters praise the beauty of the Russian nature in their works. Ivan Shishkin is especially famous with his canvases representing Russian forest ( e. g. «Morning in the Pine Forest») while Isaac Levitan derived inspiration from the Russian autumn.

The Peredvizhniki included artists of the XIX century. One of them was Ilya Repin who is an artist celebrated for his large canvases like «Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan» or «Barge Haulers on the Volga». Victor Vasnetsov chose the folk Russian style for his «Bogatyrs» and Mikhail Vrubel is noted for originality of thought. His «Demon» is the fruit of his fantastic imagination.
Ivan Aivazovsky gained a world-wide fame by his romantic paintings representing sea. «The Ninth Wave» is a masterpiece revealing the beauty of the mighty sea on a stormy day.

Russian Art is exhibited in The State Russian Museum in Saint-Petersburg. And in the department of English Art in the Hermitage you can enjoy some of the masterpieces of the British painters.

One of the most famous of them is John Constable - an English Romantic painter who is principally known for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, an area near his house in Suffolk which is now known as «Constable Country».

William Turner was a landscape artist whose style can be said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism.

William Hogarth is renowned not only for his portraits but also for the series of paintings with satiric details characterizing English high society, in the 1740s.
Thomas Gainsborough is one of the most famous portrait and landscape painters of XVIII century Britain. In the National Gallery, London, you can see colorful painting «Mr. and Mrs. Andrews» which is a combination of family portrait and landscape, and dark portrait of «Mr and Mrs William Hal-lett» that exemplifies Gainsborough's mature style.

William Blake is an English poet and painter. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime today, his works considered significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts. His paintings may seem very unusual and fantastic. For example, he depicted Isaac Newton as a divine geometer.

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