The Russian School of Painting
eyes to the advanced roads of contemporary art. Abroad, Shishkin went to school to the timid and feeble representatives of German landscape painting, and failed to appreciate both the school of Barbizon masters—which at that time had reached its full development—and the new-born Impressionism. He brought from Germany the painful and dry orderliness of his landscape plans, his cheerless colouring, as well as his proneness to "compose" motives, found in nature, into "pictures." It is hardly to be doubted, however, that his conscientious sketches and precise, firm pencil drawings have greatly furthered the education of the Russian painters' eye and taught them to see the nature of their native country.
Several painters of the seventies made considerable progress in the direction of a more original and poetical conception of landscape. The most extraordinary figure among them is Savrasov. He produced practically only one picture: his famous "The Rooks Have Come," but this first Russian "spring" picture came as a symbol, so to speak, of the entire regeneration of Russian painting. There is felt in this picture the fragrance of that soft poetry which blossoms forth in the wonderful "poems in colour" of Levitan, Syerov, and Korovin.
The art of Fyodor Vasilyev (1850–1873) has re-
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