Description of the picture:
Terrace by the sea – Sylvester Feodosievich Shchedrin. 1828. Oil on canvas. 45.5×66.5
Sylvester Shchedrin’s landscapes are filled with a lively sense of nature, sunlight, transparent air, an inextricable link between the life of nature and human life. So Russian landscape painters did not write to him.
In the painting of classicism, the landscape served as an expression of ideal beauty and harmony. And since in nature, from the point of view of the theory of classicism, there can be no ideal, for its creation it was necessary to streamline the nature. “Painting …” P.P. Chekalevsky argued, “surpasses nature itself … selects the most perfect sight of nature as a whole, unites different parts of many places and the beauty of many private people.” The classic landscape was supposed to correct, ennoble nature.
The first of the Russian artists, Sylvester Shchedrin, fully overcome this conventionality of classicism. Nature in all the charm of its reality, everyday life becomes the subject of attention of the painter. But at the same time, he does not look at nature with the stern eye of an analyst or a writer, but with the look of a poet in love with her.
The artist performs the Terraces series during the years 1825-1828. More than his other landscapes, they are specific in their reflection of the real life of nature, in the transfer of its state. One of the best in this series is “Terrace by the sea”. The sensation of the languor of a summer sultry noon, the coolness of the shaded terrace, the sweetness of rest is amazingly accurately conveyed. Shchedrin comes close to the problem of plein air painting, that is, to painting in the open air. He seeks to convey an air environment that softens the shapes of objects, observes a color change in variously lit places, notices color reflexes, he is occupied by a lively play of light and shadow.
Schedrin’s landscapes are a poetic story about Italy, about the amazing country of the sun and the sea, about her dreamy bliss, about her people living a single life with nature. But at the same time, Sylvester Shchedrin remains a Russian artist."