biblical paintings – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

Fyodor Antonovich Bruni, “The Brazen Serpent”, 1841, Oil on Canvas, 565 x 852 cm, The Mikhailovsky Palace, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Born in Milan in December of 1801, Fyodor Antonovich Bruni was a Russian Academic painter of Swiss-Italian descent. He was the son of Swiss citizen Antonio Baroffi-Bruni, a Gold Medal of Honor officer of the Austrian army and commissioned painter to Tsar Paul I and the royal Kurakin and Baryatinsky families.

Exhibiting a talent in art from a very early age, Fyodor Bruni learned his basic artistic skills from his father before enrolling at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. His education was sponsored by Italian count Giulio Renato Litta, both a fellow high-ranking Austrian officer and countryman to Fyodor Bruni’s father. Bruni received an excellent education under the guidance of such artists as portraitist Grigory Ugryumov, anatomical-drawing professor Vasily Shebuyev, and historical painter Andrei Ivanov. During this study period, Bruni created his first self-portrait, a romanticized image dressed in an open shirt, now housed in The State Russian Museum.

In 1818, Bruni entered his “Samson and Delilah” in a competitive examination at the Academy. Failing to achieve the gold medal, he continued his studies in Italy. Bruni, however, was no longer receiving support from Count Litta and subsisted on financial support from his father until Antonio Baroffi-Bruni’s death in 1825. In Italy, Bruni created several large historical compositions including the 1824 “The Death of Camilla, Horace’s Sister” and 1825 “St. Cecilia”, but received no compensation for his efforts. After copying Raphael’s frescoes “The Triumph of Galatea” and”The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple” in 1827, Bruni received the patronage and assistance of Princess Zinaida Volkonskaya, a German-Russian composer and writer as well as the wife of Prince Nikita Volkonsky, aide to the Royal Court.

Supported now by a patron, Fyodor Bruni began to produce compositions focused on Roman and Ancient Greek mythologies, among these are the 1827 “The Awakening of the Graces” and the 1828 “A Bacchante Giving Cupid a Drink”. In February of 1827, he informed Russia’s Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts that he had begun work in Italy on a large painting entitled “The Brazen Serpent”, based on an Old Testament story of Moses leading the Jewish people out of Egypt. In early 1828, Bruni was awarded a five-year stipend with the purpose of improving his painting skills, through an edict issued by Nicolas I, Emperor of Russia and Grand Duke of Finland.

During an earlier trip to London, Bruni met and fell in love with Angelica Serni, the well-educated daughter of a wealthy French hotelier. Although he desired to wed her, he could not secure her parents’ consent to marriage due to his financial condition at that time. In the spring of 1830, Bruni attempted to enter his “Bacchante” at a juried exhibition in Rome. The jury declined its entry due to the semi-nude depiction and as a gesture of respect for the Lenten season. Bruni was awarded, while working in Italy in 1834, the title of Academician in consideration of all his achievements. The next year, he married Angelica Serni in Rome, a ceremony attended by many known Russian artists and Roman patrons.

At the Emperor’s order, Fyodor Bruni and his wife relocated to Russia where they settled in St. Petersburg at a house belonging to the Imperial Academy. Now an established professor of the second degree, he taught painting students and created murals for the Winter Palace’s church as well as an image in 1837 of the deceased novelist and playwright Alexander Pushkin. In August of 1838, Fyodor Bruni returned with his wife to Italy, now as a wealthy, established artist favored by the Russian Emperor, and continued work on his large-scale composition, “The Brazen Serpent”.

In December of that year, the heir to the Russian throne, Grand Duke Alexander Nikolayevich, visited Bruni’s studio and promoted an exhibition of works by Russian artists in Rome. The Grand Duke commissioned a series of projects from these artists; he particularly praised Bruni’s composition “The Mother of God” and purchased it for his own collection. A series of four “Mother of God” paintings were also commissioned by Grigory Rakhmanov, a member of the Imperial Court, for installation at a Greek Russian church.

Fyodor Bruni finished his great work “The Brazen Serpent” in 1841 and took it to St. Petersburg where it was exhibited in a hall at the newly restored Winter Palace. Later in the year, he returned once more to Rome and, during his four-year residency, created twenty-five sketches that would form the foundation of a frescoe series at St. Petersburg’s Saint Isaac’s Cathedral. Bruni painted several of these frescoes; the rest were executed by artists under his direction. This series of frescoes were completed in 1853 and the sketches are now housed in The State Russian Museum. Bruni became the Custodian of the Gallery at the Hermitage Museum in 1849. As a part of his duties, he twice traveled abroad to acquire new works of art for the Hermitage collection.

In 1855, Bruni became the Rector of the Sculpture and Painting Department at St. Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of the Arts. As he aged, he became more reclusive, often disappearing for weeks at a time. Bruni often openly expressed an intolerance towards younger artists; due to this behavior, he was forced to resign his position in 1871. Despite this behavior, Bruni was awarded a honorary Professorship at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and at Rome’s Academy of San Luca. Fyodor Antonovich Bruni died in August of 1875, at the age of seventy-six, in St. Petersburg and was interred in the city’s Tikhvin Cemetery.

Fyodor Bruni’s 1841 monumental oil painting “The Brazen Serpent” was completed after fifteen years of work. His earliest known sketch on the subject is dated at 1824; his general sketch of the composition was under-painted on board in 1833. Bruni began work in Italy on the final version in the same year, with alternate periods of work on other projects in Italy and Russia. On the fifteenth of April in 1841, he decided his great work was completed.

“The Brazen Serpent” was first exhibited in Rome and received the approval of its population. At the end of June, the painting was sent to Russia and exhibited in September at the Winter Palace and later at the Academy of Arts. After a public exhibition in 1842, Emperor Nicolas I purchased the painting and awarded Bruni the Order of St. Vladimir of the fourth level. Now part of the State Russian Museum, it is considered to be the largest Russian history painting and the largest in the museum’s collection.

The theme of “The Brazen Serpent” is based on a Book of Numbers account within the Bible’s Old Testament that chronicles Moses’s leading the people of Judah through the waterless desert areas of Egypt. When the people loose their faith in Moses’s leadership, a punishment in the form of a rain of poisonous serpents descends upon them. Moses, commanded by the Lord, erected a brazen serpent in their midst. Those individuals, who had repented and looked at the brazen serpent with true faith, lived and the bites inflicted by the serpents were healed.

Notes: There is some discrepancy in regards to the Milan birth date of Russian painter Fyodor Antonovich Bruni. While several sources cited June of 1799 as Bruni’s birthdate, I deferred to Russia’s Voronezh Regional Art Museum and Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery that cite his birthdate as December of 1801.

Top Insert Image: Arkady Lvov, “Fyodor Antonovich Bruni, Rector of the Imperial Academy of Arts”, circa 1855-1860, Photolithograph by A. Transhel

Second Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Mother of God with the Eternal Child”, mid-1830s, Oil on Cardboard, 69.5 x 47 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Study for Madonna in Gloria”, mid-1830s, Pencil on Paper, 58 x 44 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Bacchant”, 1858, Oil on Canvas, 91.2 x 71.5 cm, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Fifth Insert Image: Fyodor Bruni, “Two Male Models”, circa 1820-1830, Pencil on Paper, The Russian Academy of the Arts, St. Petersburg

Bottom Insert Image: Fyodor Antonovich Bruni, “The Brazen Serpent”, 1841, Detail, Oil on Canvas, 565 x 852 cm, The Mikhailovsky Palace, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Charles Sprague Pearce, “The Arab Jeweler”, 1882, Oil on Canvas, 116.8 x 80.9 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in October of 1851, Charles Sprague Pearce was an American artist, one of the generation of American artists who in increasing numbers settled in France after the Civil War. Strongly influenced by the predominant European styles of the period, he explored a wide range of both subjects and artistic expressions throughout his successful career as an expatriate.

Born into a wealthy family, Charles Sprague Pearce was immersed from an early age in a setting which stimulated his appreciation of the arts. His parents were accomplished at the violin and piano; Pearce’s father was a dealer in Chinese porcelains, objects that would later influence many of the works in his mid-career. He was enrolled by his parents in the prestigious Boston Latin School where he was recognized for his artistic talent. After graduating, Pearce worked with his father at his Chinese import business, Shadrach H. Pearce and Company, for five years. Deciding to pursue a career as an artist, he left Boston for Paris in August of 1873.

After his arrival, Pearce enrolled in the atelier of academic painter Léon Bonnat who had achieved recognition for his historical paintings, genre scenes and portraits. In his career, Pearce would also produce work in these same categories. Léon Bonnat’s strong influence can be seen in Pearce’s earliest works, inspired by his ambitious travels, in their treatment of light and shadow, and in the modeling of the subject. In the course of his career, Pearce initially concentrated on historical paintings that often portrayed biblical stories; he produced primarily portraits in the middle portion of his career. Pearce’s final works consisted of mainly pastoral and generic scenes depicting peasants in the French countryside.

Orientalist themes had begun to appear in many works at the Paris Salon. Paintings presented by Eugène Delacroix, Eugène Fromentin, and Jean-Léon Gérôme revealed the customs, dress, and landscape of Eastern countries with an almost realistic precision. Charles Pearce and American painter Frederick Arthur Bridgman, also a student at Bonnat’s atelier, left for Egypt in the latter part of 1873 and spent three months traveling down the Nile River. Besides the attraction that the exotic East presented to the two artists, Pearce had contracted consumption and felt that the warmer climate would aid in his recovery. Both men produced a wealth of drawings and immersed themselves in a culture that was unfamiliar to their own. In 1974, Pearce traveled again, this time to Algeria, where he spent the winter months absorbing its culture and daily life. As a result of this trip, new paintings of orientalist themes were added to his body of work.

After his return to Paris, Pearce made his Paris Salon debut in 1876 with the portrait of the American author and historical activist Ellen Hardin Walworth. Despite his travel experiences and many orientalist works, he made the decision to enter a portrait for his first exhibition at the Salon. For the 1877 Salon, Pearce decided to exhibit a historical scene and entered his “La Mort du Premier Né (Death of the First Born). This biblical scene of mourning Egyptians with the coffin of their dead child contained, based on his first hand knowledge, integrated Eastern details in its composition. Even though Pearce worked on Biblical themes, his work continued to show a predominating interest in Orientalism and the depiction of ethnographic detailing. “La Mort du Premier Né” established Pearc’s reputation as a serious artist and was later exhibited in Boston, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Charles Sprague Pearce continued to exhibit biblical works at the Paris Salons of 1879, where he presented “Le Sacrifice d’Abraham”, and 1881, where he earned honorable mention for his “Décollation de Saint Jean-Baptiste (The Beheading of St. John the Baptist)”. This black ink and white gouache drawing on wove paper was later exhibited at Pennsylvania’s Academy of Fine Arts and received a first-place honor. In 1882, Pearce executed his “The Arab Jeweler”, an ambitious oil on canvas portrayal of a native craftsman, now housed in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. His interest in Orientalism and the exotic drew him to the rage of Japanese work that was prevalent in the galleries and publications of Paris. Pearce’s 1883 “Femme á l’ Éventail (Lady with a Fan)”, depicting a European woman dressed in her kimono and holding a fan, examplifies his placement of oriental objects into his work.

At the 1883 Salon, Pearce presented a peasant themed work “Porteuse D’eau (The Water Carrier)” for which he won a third-class medal. Two years later, he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a rural commune twenty-seven kilometers from the center of Paris, where he would remain for the rest of his life. In 1885, Pearce exhibited “Peines de Coeur (Troubles of the Heart)” at the Salon; this painting, depicting one girl consoling another, won the Temple Gold Medal for best figure painting at the Pennsylvania Academy exhibition. In the late 1880s, Pearce continued his peasant themed work and began to add pastoral paintings to his oeuvre. He remained a consistent yearly exhibitor at the Salon and participated in several international shows in England, Belgium, Germany and the United States.

Beginning with his election to the jury of the Universal Exposition of 1889, Charles Sprague Pearce became involved in a number of ambitious activities. These included chairing both the Paris advisory committee for Chicago’s 1893 World Columbian Exposition and the Paris committee for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis. Pearce also helped organize the first large scale American art exhibition in Belguim for the 1894 Antwerp World’s Fair. Even though he adopted a preference for typical French style and subject matter, he was still interested in promoting other American artists, particularly those with a link to France. For his contributions in the field of art, he was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1894.

In his work, Pearce addressed the interest of the times, ranging from an obsession with the mid and far-East to the more socially driven goals in the depiction of the peasant. He had fully immersed himself in the life and artistic culture of Paris and gained acclaim while maintaining his support for other American artists and exhibitions. Pearce’s last exhibition at the Salon was in 1906 when he presented “Jeune Picarde (Young Girl of Picardie)”. He died in Auvers-sur-Oise in May of 1914.

Among Charles Sprague Pearce’s many honors are Chevalier, Order of King Leopold, Belgium in 1895; Chevalier, Order of Red Eagle, Prussia in 1897; and Chevalier, Order of Red Eagle, Denmark in 1898. Pearce was also Vice President and founding member of The Paris Society of American Painters; Associate National Academician of the National Academy of Design, New York in 1906; and posthumously promoted to National Academician of the National Academy of Design; New York in 1920.

Top Insert Image: Charles Sprague Pearce, “Self Portrait”, 1876, Oil on Canvas Laid on Board, 33.3 x 25.7 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Charles Sprague Pearce, “Auvers-sur-Oise”, circa 1894, Oil on Canvas, 82.6 x 95.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Charles Sprague Pearce, “Paul Wayland Bartlett”, 1890, Oil on Canvas, 150.5 x 117.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Fourth Insert Image: Charles Sprague Pearce, “La Mort du Premier Né (Death of the First Born)”, circa 1877, Oil on Canvas, 97.8 x 130.8 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Charles Sprague Pearce at His Studio, Auvers-sur-Oise”, 1895, Vintage Print