The following pages are not offered to the reader as a history of the
invasion of Russia by Napoleon. They are but the statement of the basis
of observation on which M. Verestchagin has founded his great series of
pictures illustrative of the campaign. These pictures are now to be
exhibited in this country, and the painter has naturally desired to show
us from what point of view he has approached the study of his
subject—one of the greatest subjects in the whole range of
history—especially for a Russian artist. The point of view is—inevitably
in his case—that of the Realist; and this consideration gives unity to
the conception of his whole career and endeavour. He has ever painted
war as it is, and therefore in its horrors, as one of its effects,
though not necessarily as an effect sought in and for itself. He has
tried to be “true” in all his representations of the battle-field. His
work may thus be said to constitute a powerful plea in support of the
Tsar’s Rescript to the Nations in favour of peace. My meaning will be
best illustrated by a short sketch of M. Verestchagin and his work, as
painter, as soldier, and as traveller.
He was born in the province of Novgorod, in 1842, of a well-to-do family
of landowners. The son wished to be an artist; the father wished to make
him an officer of marines. As the shortest way out of the difficulty, he
became both. He passed his work-hours at the naval school, and his
play-hours at a school of design, working at each so well that he left
the naval school as first scholar, and eventually won a silver medal at
the Academy of Fine Arts. He entered the service, but only for a short
time, and he was still three years under twenty when he quitted it to
devote himself wholly to art.
He was a hard-working student, though he always showed a strong
disposition to insist on working in his own way. When Gérôme sent him to
the antique, he was half the time slipping away to nature. He played
truant from the Athenian marbles to flesh and blood. In the meantime he
was true to the instinct—as yet you could hardly call it a principle—of
wandering from the beaten track in search of subjects. Every vacation
was passed, not at Asnières or Barbizon, but in the far east of Europe,
or even in Persia, among those ragged races not yet set down in artistic
black and white. He had been on the borders of a quite fresh field of
observation in these journeys; and he was soon to enter it for a full
harvest of new impressions. It was in 1867; Russia was sending an army
into Central Asia, to punish the marauding Turkomans for the fiftieth
time, and General Kauffman, who commanded it, invited the painter to
accompany him as an art volunteer. He was not to fight, but simply to
look on. It was the very thing; Verestchagin at once took service on
these terms with the expedition, and in faithfully following its
fortunes, with many an artistic reconnaissance on his own account, he
saw Asia to its core.
He returned from a second Asiatic journey to settle at Munich for three
years; and here he built his first “open-air studio.” “If you are to
paint out-door scenes,” he says, “your models must sit in the open;” and
so he fashioned a movable room on wheels, running on a circular tramway,
and open to sun and air on the side nearest the centre of the circle,
where the model stood. The artist, in fact, worked in a huge box with
one side out, while the thing he saw was in the full glare of day; and
by means of a simple mechanical contrivance he made his room follow the
shifting light.
After a long rest at Munich, he was impatient for action once more, and
in 1873 he set off for British India.
Verestchagin filled one entire exhibition with his Indian studies. They
form a definite part of his collection, a section of his life-work.
Amazing studies they are. The end of his sojourn coincided with the
visit of the Prince of Wales, and he saw India both at its best and at
its worst. In one immense canvas he has represented the royal entry into
Jeypore, the Prince and his native entertainer on a richly-caparisoned
elephant, and a long line of lesser magnates similarly mounted in the
rear. A scene of prayer in a mosque is noble in feeling, and it exhibits
an amazing mastery of technique. The Temple of Indra, the Caves of
Ellora—all the great show-places—are there, with their furniture of
priests, deities, monsters, and men-at-arms. He made a prodigious
journey, from St. Petersburg by Constantinople to Egypt, Hindostan, the
Himalayas, and Thibet.
On his return he saw a great national subject at last—the Russo-Turkish
War. He followed the armies and saw it all, still as a civilian in name,
but as a soldier in fact. He could not keep out of it, both from
patriotism and from artistic conscientiousness. On one occasion his
desire to study the effect of a gun-boat in the air nearly cost him his
life. When the Russians were preparing to cross the Danube opposite
Rustchuk, their engineers found it almost impossible to carry on their
surveys for a bridge, owing to the proximity of the Turkish gun-boats.
Some men were accordingly sent out to lay fixed torpedoes across the
river to prevent the approach of the gun-boats. But they themselves
required protection while engaged in the service, and a few
torpedo-launches were accordingly ordered to patrol the river for that
purpose. They were not to wait to be attacked, but to boldly assume the
offensive, and sink or drive off the big gun-boats. It was a most
dangerous duty, and when Verestchagin asked permission to serve in one
of the launches the officer in command tried to deter him. “Russia has
many hundreds of officers like me,” he said, “but not two painters like
you.” Verestchagin, however, was allowed to have his way. The launch he
chose was very swift; it went almost at the speed of a train. It soon
came in sight of one of the gun-boats, to the great terror of the
Turkish crew. They could be seen running about the deck shouting and
shaking their fists at one another. The gun-boat turned tail at once,
but the little torpedo-launch gained on it every moment. By this time
the whole Turkish force had taken the alarm, and a fire was concentrated
on the little launch both from the gun-boat and the banks of the river,
under which it was evident she could not live. She pushed on, however,
shoved the torpedo under the bows of the Turk, and—it hung fire. It
touched her fairly, but the wire connecting with the fuse had been cut
in half by shot. Having done this, or rather having failed to do it, the
launch was carried away by the tide, and just as she got clear of the
vessel the Turks renewed their awful fire from ship and shore.
Verestchagin suddenly felt a sickening sensation, as if he had been
roughly pushed, and putting his hand to the place found a wound that
would admit his three fingers. At this moment the crew of the Russian
launch saw another Turkish monitor coming towards them, and firing as
she came, so that they stood a good chance of being caught between these
two monsters—as they might fairly be called in relation to the size of
the launch. However, the launch turned and ran, closely pursued by the
nearest gun-boat, which she had amiably tried to destroy. The pursuer
was fast gaining on them in their crippled condition, when, at a turn in
the river, they saw a little creek. They made for it and were saved. The
gun-boat could not follow for fear of going aground.
This incident nearly finished Verestchagin’s artistic career. He lay
between life and death for weeks, but a devoted Russian nurse brought
him round. Of course he went back to work again as soon as he could
move, and in one way or other saw and painted nearly all of the
campaign, especially Shipka, and the final rush on Constantinople.
De Lonlay gives us a characteristic picture of Verestchagin at this
time.
“On November 24, 1877,” he says, “we were in Bulgaria, at the foot of
the great Balkans. Our little expeditionary corps, commanded by the
brave General Daudeville, had just taken possession of a city after an
obstinate fight, and was still trembling with the excitement of the
struggle. We ran through the deserted streets of the Turkish quarter,
which had been abandoned by its inhabitants. Everywhere we saw the same
lamentable signs of devastation—doors broken open, windows smashed; and
within the houses, furniture in fragments, heaps of wearing apparel in
rags, and a quantity of the stuffing of the ottomans strewed all about,
the Bulgarian pillagers having cared only for the ornamental coverings.
Amid all this confusion lay the bodies of three Redifs and an Arnaut.
The marauders had already stripped them of their uniforms, leaving them
nothing but a little underclothing. A little further on, a Redif, still
dressed in his blue tunic, lay on the ground. Suddenly, there came
clattering by a troop of Cossacks who had just been hunting the Turkish
runaways. They were rough-looking fellows, these soldiers in their white
linen, all in rags, and with their fur caps browned by the bivouac fires
and half bare with the wear and tear of the campaign; but among them I
remarked an elegant horseman who contrasted strongly with the rest of
the troop. He was dressed half like a soldier and half like a tourist.
He wore a high Circassian cap in Astrakan fur trimmed with silver. From
his breast hung the officer’s cross of the military order of St.
George,[1] a high distinction justly envied in Russia. The handle and
the scabbard of his poignard and sabre were in chiselled silver. I
followed him a long time with my eyes, admiring his bearing. A little
later on in the same day I found my unknown once more. He was sitting on
a low camp-stool in a corner of the grand mosque, and making a study of
the minaret. His aristocratic face, of a long oval, was ornamented with
a beard of a chestnut colour, and it contrasted strangely with the olive
complexion and high cheek-bones of the Mussulman-Cossacks who surrounded
him and peeped curiously at the work he was doing. It reminded me of
Salvator Rosa working in the midst of the bandits of the Abruzzi. At
this point a common friend of both of us came on the scene and presented
us to one another. I had before me the great Russian painter Basil
Verestchagin, who had but just recovered from the serious wound received
in the previous June. We talked for a long time of Paris and of the war.
Verestchagin complained bitterly of not having been able to take part in
the passage of the Danube, and see the winter campaign as he had seen
the summer one. ‘What good luck you had,’ he said, ‘to follow Gourko in
his expedition beyond the great Balkans! What things you must have seen,
the massacre at Shipka, and the burning of Eski Zara. If you only knew
how it enraged me to be tied down to my bed in the ambulance while the
army was going on!’ Then he paid me a few compliments on the modest
drawings which I was sending to the _Monde Illustré_, compliments which
touched me very much as they were offered by such an eminent artist.
“A few days after, the branch of the Cossacks of the Don to which I was
attached, and the regiment of the Grenadiers of the Guard, entered the
pass of the Balkans by the route which leads to Statitza. At nightfall
we halted on a plateau covered with snow, and where the temperature was
below zero. We were therefore not at all disinclined to take refuge in
an old Turkish block-house and to light up a good fire. There I found
Verestchagin again, with Prince Tzerteleff, the former secretary of
Ignatieff, and Prince Tchakowski, who were all following our columns as
amateurs. Enveloped in our _bourkas_, we talked away for hours round
this bivouac fire, Verestchagin telling us of his perilous expedition in
Turkestan. I can still hear him talking in his soft and quiet voice of
all those scenes of massacre and carnage which he had seen with his own
eyes.
“A fortnight after, I was at Plevna, which had just fallen into the
hands of the Russian army, and there I saw Verestchagin again. He was
staying with General Skobeleff, governor of the city. The great artist
was fresh from the terrible battles, and from the scenes of misery which
he had seen in the camps of the Turkish prisoners, and he was projecting
another series of pictures. He was therefore, with his usual passion for
accuracy, taking pains to collect arms and uniforms of the enemy as
models. He showed great joy when one of the officers present offered to
conduct him to the place in which the spoils of the garrison of Osman
Pacha were stored. By the light of a torch carried by a grenadier he
rummaged a long time in this heap of Peabody-Martini rifles, covered
with mud and dust, torn uniforms stained with blood, blue vests with red
lacings of the Nizams, brass-buttoned tunics and red waistbands of the
Redifs, etc. Next morning we separated. Verestchagin followed the column
of Skobeleff in its march to Shipka; and I went to Orkanie to rejoin the
corps of General Gourko.”
As a war-painter Verestchagin is a great moralist, and he is a great
moralist because he is quite sincere. He paints exactly what he sees on
the battle-field, and he is far in advance of the French, who are the
fathers of this species of composition, in his rendering of the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about this bloody sport of
kings. There was a whole wide world of difference in spirit between his
little military gallery and the big one at Versailles. The earlier
Frenchmen give us pretty uniforms, a monarch prancing on his steed in
the moment of victory, an elegantly wounded warrior or two in the
foreground, obviously in the act of crying, “Vive la France!” a host in
picturesque flight, a host in picturesque pursuit, waving banners, and a
great curtain of smoke to hide the general scene of butchery, with
supplementary puffs for every disgusting detail. Verestchagin’s manner,
on the contrary, passing like a breeze of wholesome truthfulness, lifts
this theatrical vapour, and shows us what is below—men writhing out
their lives in every species of agony by shot and bayonet wounds, by the
dry rot of fever, by the wet rot of cold and damp; and finding their
last glance to heaven intercepted by the crows or the vultures, waiting
for a meal. All this is very shocking, but looked at in the right way it
is supremely moral.
His work is his biography. He has lived every one of his pictures, and
he has often had to study at almost the cost of his life. All that he
represents he has seen; all that he relates with his pencil he has
lived. These pictures are just so many chapters detached from his
history. They are the work of an artist of an exceptional nature; and
are worthy of a book written on the critical method of Sainte-Beuve, a
book wherein the man would occupy a place at least as considerable as
the work itself; for the one and the other are inseparable. He is the
first Russian painter who has given his countrymen a true impression of
war—something besides those official pictures where victory is displayed
and never defeat. Even when he paints victory he never separates it from
its sadness, its ruin, its misery, its mourning beyond relief. I seem to
have always before my eyes, as in a dream, that pyramid of piled-up
skulls which he met with somewhere in his wanderings, and of which he
has made one of his most striking pictures. He wrote underneath it,
“Dedicated to the conquerors.”
Verestchagin had done nothing but draw; painting had frightened him.
Gérôme and Bida in vain tried to persuade him to begin. When he returned
from his second journey to the frontiers of Persia, among those nomadic
tribes with changeless manners, who must have descended from Abraham, he
showed his album and note-books to the two painters, and they pressed
him all the more. Bida said, “No one draws like you,” and he accepted a
few sketches, one of which is to be found in his famous Bible.
After his Asiatic campaign he had three years’ work at Munich, an
enormous and improbable labour, so much so that his enemies insinuated
that such a number and variety of pictures could not be the work of a
single man, and that Verestchagin had been helped by German painters.
The calumny reached St. Petersburg, where he was exhibiting at the time.
At his request the Art Society of Munich opened a thorough inquiry into
the matter. Models, porters, everybody that knew anything about it,
testified on oath that no painter but Verestchagin had so much as
entered the _atelier_. The report, covered all over with the best
signatures of Munich, and with a postscript of the most flattering kind,
was sent on to the Russian capital. When they gave Verestchagin the
surname of the Horace Vernet of Russia, no doubt they thought they were
saying something in his praise; but he certainly had a right to feel
calumniated, for the general impression left by his work is not
admiration for princes nor glorification of war. In telling the truth
feelingly about the sufferings of the soldier, without distinction of
nationality, with as much pity for the vanquished as for the victors,
Verestchagin has shown himself essentially human. His pictures, with
their poignant reality and elevated philosophy, are at the same time a
terrible satire on ambitious despots. Verestchagin is a courtier of
nothing but misfortune. A pupil of Gérome, he seems to have travelled
very much in search of himself. Sometimes he has drawn near to
Meissonier, then there is something in him of Géricault and of Courbet,
and again he is a true Impressionist in the best acceptation of the
term.
As a traveller he saw Samarcand when the sight was almost as rare and
strange as that from the famous “peak in Darien.” “Samarcand,” he says,
“was occupied by the Russians. Our armies had taken it without assault,
after having routed the troops of the Emir. On reaching the summit of
the hill I stopped there, dazzled, and, so to speak, awed by
astonishment and admiration. Samarcand was there under my eyes, bathed
in verdure. Above its gardens and its houses were reared ancient and
gigantic mosques, and I who had come from so far was going to enter the
city, once so splendid, which was the capital of Tamerlane.”
On that day, as Vambéry has told us, a new era opened for Central Asia.
“The countries and cities once absolutely closed to the Western man are
now opened before him. There where a European could not make a single
step without danger of death, he now comes and goes as freely as he
pleases, for a Christian army holds the land. At Tashkend, Khojend, and
at Samarcand there are clubs, _cafés_, and churches. Tashkend has its
Russian newspaper, and with the plaintive chant of the Muezzin is
mingled the tinkling bell of the Greek Church, more terrible to the ear
of the true believer than the thunder of cannonades. In the streets of
Bokhara, where, but a few years ago, the author of these lines heard
only Mussulman hymns, the Russian priest, the Russian soldier, and the
Russian merchant are now walking together with the pride of the
conqueror. A hospital and a storehouse occupy the once splendid palace
where Tamerlane used to command; the palace to which all the princes of
the East came to do homage, to which the monarchs of Spain and the
Indies sent an embassy to beg for the friendship of the great conqueror,
and where the Turanians, humble and devout, knelt, to strike with their
foreheads the green stone which forms the sacred pedestal of the throne
of Timour. By the victory of the Russian eagles in Central Asia, Islam
has received a most terrible wound. For the whole thousand years and
more during which it has struggled with Christianity it has never been
hit so full in the breast. In our time Western civilization acts
vigorously on Mussulman Asia from Byzantium to India, and even Mecca and
Medina have not escaped its influence. Central Asia alone had remained
the sanctuary of Mahomedanism. The evil there had not been changed, and
it was not Mecca but Bokhara which passed for the intellectual centre of
Islam. The ascetic, the member of a religious order, the theologian,
sighed for this sacred city, and the most zealous Mussulmans of the
Ottoman Empire, of Egypt, of Fez, and of Morocco, came to cherish their
fanaticism in its schools and in its mosques. Samarcand is incontestably
the Maracanda of the Greeks, the capital of the ancient Sogdiana. It was
the queen city of the basin of the Oxus. It lost its preponderance for a
time, but recovered it, and under Tamerlane reached the height of its
splendour. The Mahomedans had a thousand poetic expressions in praise of
its wealth, its abundance of water, its innumerable canals fed from
mountain torrents, and running in all directions through the plain.”
When on the Himalayas Verestchagin ascended the highest mountain but one
on the face of the globe—Kanchinga. Kanchinga is twenty-eight thousand
odd feet above the level of the sea, and only Mount Everest in Nepaul
takes the palm of it with 29,000 feet. But Mount Everest is a peak, and
no one can get up there; while Kanchinga is a huge mass of mountain that
invites the climber. But Verestchagin was at Kanchinga in January, when
the mountain was covered with ice and snow, so he could not get higher
than 15,000 feet, and he was considered a madman for trying to do that.
Some English officers in the neighbourhood, when first they heard of his
project, did all they could to dissuade him from it. With his
characteristic obstinacy he simply thanked them for their advice and
went on with his preparations for the ascent. “At least,” they said,
“you will never take the lady?” Madame Verestchagin was with him, and
had insisted on accompanying him. “That will depend upon her,” said
Verestchagin, and his wife went with him all the same. It was a
frightful ascent. The coolies abandoned them when they had gone a very
little way—these dark-skinned races cannot stand the cold—and at last
they had only one man, who carried the colour-box and drawing-tools, the
use of which was Verestchagin’s main object in the journey. The painter
wanted to go up there to study effects of snow and cloud. By and by even
this man’s courage failed him, it became so intensely cold. They were
wading in snow up to the knees in some places and in others up to the
waist. The ponies had been left below. There was no house or shelter of
any kind. They called a halt, and the courier went back to get help,
leaving Verestchagin and his wife on the mountain in the midst of the
snow, with only a small wood fire between them and all but certain
death, and with nothing but snow for meat and drink. They cowered over
the fire till the falling snow put it out, and then for all that day and
night till far into the next day they struggled as best they could for
life. As a final and desperate effort, Verestchagin, taking leave of his
wife, whom he never expected to see again, roused himself and dragged
his almost frozen limbs down the mountain to look for help. When he had
gone a long way he met the coolie who had last left them, coming back
with food and aid, only just in time to save both the travellers’ lives.
Verestchagin was so exhausted that he had to be carried back to where
his wife lay. As soon as he had recovered, he took out his colour-box
and made some capital sketches of Himalayan effects.
In 1881, a memorable exhibition of Verestchagin’s pictures was held in
Vienna. Its success was probably without a parallel in the history of
art exhibitions by a single painter. For a whole month the public poured
into the rooms at an average rate of certainly not less than eight
thousand a day (on the last day twenty thousand passed or tried to pass
through the rooms), until, from the Emperor to his humblest subjects,
the peasantry included, there was no class, and it may be added no
nationality, within the Empire, which had not sent its representatives
to the Künstlerhaus. An attempt, by some political papers, to make the
enthusiasm of the Slavs for Verestchagin a means of exciting the
hereditary jealousy between them and other races of the Empire was
happily frustrated. It is literally true that the broad thoroughfare
leading to the exhibition was often blocked by the immense crowd, and
that the announcement, “The gallery is full to overflowing,” had to be
hung out to excuse the temporary closing of the building two or three
times a day. The artist did not conceal from his friends that he was
proud of the popular and even of the numerical element in his success,
because it showed that his work had touched those it was above all meant
to reach. He had painted for the people in the highest sense, and their
response showed that he had not laboured in vain. _Du reste_, this and
this only was his reward, for, beyond the payment of his bare expenses,
he had no pecuniary interest in the exhibition.
I may now leave the painter to speak for himself in regard to his own
guiding principles in art. The theory of them will be found in what he
has written on Progress in Art, and on Realism. The practice, in so far
as it relates to right methods of historic study for the painter, is, in
all that follows relating to the Campaign of Moscow, his latest and his
greatest series of works.