The Mikhailovsky Palace

As with literature, changes came to the fine arts at the end of the 1840s. Dramatic and sometimes even tragic notes began to increasingly burst through the soft lyrical calm of the social genre. Like Gogol and Dostoyevsky in literature, Pavel Fedotov (1815–1852) opened up the life of the tiers état — the military, civil servants and townsfolk — claiming it for art. The situations depicted by Fedotov cease to be simply an object of description or narration. Almost every “anecdote” has a social subtext. One of his central canvases, The Major Makes a Proposal (circa 1851), versions of which are in the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery, “narrates” with light irony the popular story of the ruined aristocratic officer who attempts to improve his financial position by marrying a merchant’s daughter. She in turn is rewarded with a climb up the social ladder.

In several versions of Young Widow (1851(2?)), Fedotov depicts a drama typical of those years, when soldiers’ wives were often deprived of a roof over their heads and means of subsistence on the death of their spouses.

The art of Fedotov and other genre artists of the 1840s and 1850s forms a specific bridge between the first and second halves of the nineteenth century. Themes of everyday life increasingly became the object of representation in the paintings and sculptures of these years. As before, however, the Academy of Arts continued to orientate artists on mythological, biblical and allegorical subjects, regulating the degree of lifelikeness.