This is the most significant portrait of the work of PA Fedotov. As in other works, the artist combines a portrait and a genre problem. He in detail recreates the environment in which the model resides, introduces an action – playing the piano. But he, as if, interrupts this game, turning the girl’s head and look towards the viewer, distracting the model from the occupation.
A girl in a blue dress and white apron is depicted at the moment of piano performance: her eyebrows are raised slightly, seriousness in her eyes is muffled by a slight smile on her lips. With the help of certain compositional techniques, the artist allows the viewer to feel the character and mood of his model.
The girl appears before us in all the complexity of her psychic being, during the awakening of the senses, the purposeful movement towards the future. Her look expresses complex emotional interweaving. There is both confidence and alertness at the same time, a desire to admit an outside observer into the world of his feelings and at the same time to be cut off from him. It shows that the very soul of young Zhdanovich is still in the making, in the process of formation.
The neutral background is slightly highlighted around the figure, creating a sense of light and air, while at the same time emphasizing its central position on the canvas. The portrait is distinguished by the immediacy and skill of execution. Despite diminutiveness, painting is bold and energetic. Especially clearly molded head and hands. Characteristics of the face indicate the strength, passion, liveliness and, at the same time, softness of the character of the model. The rich linear and black and white rhythm of the canvas, the restrained pastel colors in the clothes and the masterful transfer by the soft colors of the texture of the tree gives rise to a feeling of calm and home comfort.
Such girls from good Russian families became Decembrists and Narodovols, they were betrayed to the end both to a loved one and to a great cause, but they could just as well live an ordinary life without giving up the principles of morality and spirituality, spreading light around themselves his soul. This is how Nadezhda Petrovna Zhdanovich spent a long life.
Zhdanovich Nadezhda Petrovna – daughter of PV Zhdanovich and his second wife O. P. Zhdanovich. He was brought up in the Imperial Educational Society of Noble Maidens at Smolny, was released in 1854. Was married to an officer of the Finnish Regiment, AI Werner, later a general from the infantry. She owned Fedotov’s collection of works, autographs of his poems, she carefully preserved about forty letters of Fedotov and his drawings, which at the dawn of days, already at the height of the First World War, was transferred to the Russian Museum. Nadenka Zhdanovich Fedotov knew still very small, three or four years ago, made paired watercolor portraits of her and Olga’s sister, drawing both in the same red dresses, with bare hands. Even then, in a teenage girl with a serious look, he guessed the character that was fully revealed now in a young girl-college: purity without hypocrisy, femininity without affectation, dignity without arrogance, liveliness without coquetry, mind without pedantry, modesty without derogatory. How many years have passed, and its ashes have long decayed, and on the tiny Fedotov canvas, this pearl of Russian painting, everyone glows and will glow with wonderful blue eyes and a slight smile that does not conceal in itself any riddles, except for a simple but eternal riddle of charming feminine charms.
No matter how beautiful the old portraits of Fedotov were in their own way, in one of them, perhaps, he could not have reached such a height as in the portrait of Nadenka Zhdanovich. all glow and there will be glowing wonderful blue eyes and a slight smile that does not conceal any mysteries in itself, except for a simple but eternal riddle of charming feminine charm. No matter how beautiful the old portraits of Fedotov were in their own way, in one of them, perhaps, he could not have reached such a height as in the portrait of Nadenka Zhdanovich. all glow and there will be glowing wonderful blue eyes and a slight smile that does not conceal any mysteries in itself, except for a simple but eternal riddle of charming feminine charm. No matter how beautiful the old portraits of Fedotov were in their own way, in one of them, perhaps, he could not have reached such a height as in the portrait of Nadenka Zhdanovich.
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