The Morning of a Lady of the Manor as a Programme Work of Alexey Venetsianov. On the Issue of the Academic Method in the Artist’s Theory and Practices

The Morning of a Lady of the Manor (1823) by Alexey Venetsianov embodies a veiled polemic of the artist with representatives of the academic school of painting concerning the academic method. The work demonstrates not only the painter’s credo, but also his possible steps on adjusting the educational system of the Imperial Academy of Arts. He occupied an intermediate position between the supporters of mindless copying of nature and the banal poses of classical statues. Here, he tried to prove the fruitfulness of the true academic method of creating a composition based on the characters (types) of “graceful nature”, the storehouse of which was the art of his famous predecessors. The work contains references to notable images of the indisputable authorities of academic classicism: Raphael Santi and Anton Raphael Mengs. The ancient art is also presented here both by a statuette of the Crouching Venus and its pictorial recreation: a peasant woman in the same attitude. The images which had served as the basis for Venetsianov’s visual metaphors were well-known to the professors of the Academy because they were literally right before their eyes — in the Hermitage. The picture by Venetsianov, on the one hand, demonstrates his commitment to academic values, first of all to сlassical art that had inspired both Raphaels as well as Winckelmann, an outstanding theorist of neoclassicism. Behind Venetsianov’s figures, we can also see the images of those “three Greek Venuses”, about which he later wrote in his theoretical notes Something about the perspective: Aphrodite Medici, Venus of Taurida (which in fact hides the type of Venus of Milo) and the Crouching Venus. On the other hand, the amazing skill of animating ancient statues by assimilating them into painting à la Natura was meant to attest to the real truth of his artistic method.