Still life with a samovar

# 12

Oil paint on canvas, 16×20 inches. Handmade oil painting.

Масло, холст, 40 * 50 см

Still life with a samovar

Still life with a samovar — despite its apparent simplicity, this still life has many facets. It was possible to achieve the ideal shape of the objects with the help of chiaroscuro, maintaining proportions. In general, still life and due to the high competition during the rise of its popularity of the genre, certain styles were formed: floral, the most massive; floral-fruity, with a peak in popularity in the 17th century; tonal, the canvases in this case had a lot of brown and gray shades; kitchen or household style, with scenes from everyday life; fish, acted as a kind of tribute to seafarers; luxurious, reflecting the rich life of the new class of the bourgeoisie; hunting, on the canvases the beaten game and weapons were necessarily depicted; “Set table”, that is, displaying delicacies and national products; «Fake» or almost three-dimensional image that was difficult to distinguish from photography or reality.

See other paintings by Evgenia Zragevskaya here: Portrait of a girl

And of course the extraordinary style of «Vanitas». The paintings necessarily contained objects reminiscent of the frailty of life. Handmade oil painting.

Despite the lack of attraction to style among Russian artists, he looks at the direction in canvases devoted to canonical subjects. The first artist who began to develop the style in Russia was Ivan Trofimovich Khrutsky (1810-1885). Fame came to him thanks to the writing of group portraits and still lifes.
Khrutsky worked in an academic style. In 1832 he painted two of the most famous still lifes: «With a vase» and «With a bird.» In the 19th century, he became the most «bought» master in the empire.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the genre in Russia is gaining extraordinary popularity. It was then that this style becomes equal among all directions. In just 15 years, the genre has traveled a thorny path from impressionism to abstract form creation.