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Karl Brulloff
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Karl Brulloff
(1799 - 1852)
Karl Pavlovich Brulloff (also rendered Briullov, although he himself used the "Bruloff" spelling) was a Russian painter of the first half of the 19th Century, one of the transitional artists between the schools of neoclassicism and romanticism and the first Russian painter to gain widespread recognition in the West. His contemporaries called him The Great Karl. His masterpiece The Last Day of Pompeii (1830-1833), an enormous composition painted in Italy in 1830-1833, was a great success both with the public and the critics and the painter was hailed as one of the best contemporary European painters. Italian critics compared Brulloff to the greatest artists of the past, such as Rubens, Rembrandt, and Van Dyke.
Karl Brulloff (Brullo until 1822, when the family name was changed to a more Russian style) was born in 1799 in St. Petersburg into a family of Italian extraction. His great grand-father, grand-father, father and two elder brothers Fedor and Alexander were all painters. His father was a member of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, which is where Karl and his brothers received their education.
Karl entered the Academy in 1809. His talent and heritage told immediately and Brulloff advanced much faster than his fellow students. At the time, education in the academy was based on the principles of Classicism, and Brullof's early works reflect this clearly. However, the political and social changes that the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars had perpetrated in Europe were beginning to manifest themselves in fashions and artistic tastes. This was the beginning of the Romantic movement in both art and literature. One of Brulloff's early notable pictures Narcissus (1819), while painted in accordance with Classical principles in every regard, was unorthodox in its execution because the painter sought inspiration for the work in nature -- something that would be characteristic of the later Romantics.
However, it would be some time before Briulloff would break from the constraints of Classicism completely. His graduation work Three Angels Appear to Abraham near the Oaks of Mamre, while executed with technical brilliance, is otherwise quite conventional: the model work of a model student. Briulloff received a gold medal for it.
In 1821, Brulloff graduated from the Academy with distinguish. During the short period when he worked independently in the years 1821-1823, it is easy to observe his rapid shift from Classicism to Romanticism. The artist focused primarily on the portrait, an branch of painting that was frowned upon in the Academy as low, but which was central to the Romantic idealization of the human figure. Some of these works are the Portrait of the Secretary of State Piotr Kikin, Brulloff's .... |
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