Swertschkoff W. The interior of the room. 1859
Wladimir von Swertschkoff
The interior of the room
1859
Oil on canvas. 57 x 68 cm
The Russian Museum
The work was received from the Anitchkov palace.
Having started his career as a painter of battle scenes, Wladimir von Swertschkoff in the early 1850s failed twice to receive a first (gold) medal at contests at the Academy by participating with the paintings from army life. Evidently in spite of his large experience gained during the creation of drawings and paintings about the hostilities in the Baltic Sea, and in the course of the Crimean War he decided not to tempt fortune for the third time. Having made the journey abroad at his own expense he turned there to depicting interiors and on coming back in 1855 he presented to the Board of Academy two painting – “The inner rooms of Doge’s Palace” and “Scene from the Middle Ages”. For those painting he was at last awarded a first medal and a title of a painter that allowed to travel abroad for further training. “The interior of the room” created several years later, in 1859 is evidence of the artist’s mastery in the depiction of palace interiors. The painting might have been purchased for decorating official or living rooms of the Anichkov Palace, for which later Swertschkoff produced a number of stained glasses with the Romanov’s Family coat of arms for so the called Museum, a room where a part of the art collection was being kept. It was the collection that initiated the creation of the Russian Museum named after the Emperor Alexander III in St. Petersburg – the first state museum of Russian fine art in the country – opened for public in 1898.