IMG 3259 Panorama

V.G. Khudyakov (1829-1871). "Traveling Musicians" (1858) As soon as Khudyakov set about painting, a powerful “will to style” was revealed, to a great style, to which pictorial freedom is sacrificed. An example of this is the painting “Wandering Musicians”, where in the idealized, compassionate heroes of which one can hardly recognize the ingenuous characters of Khudyakov’s numerous outdoor Italian studies. Khudyakov worked on the painting in the town of Frascati near Rome. He paints his heroes on a terrace facing a landscape wide open into the distance. The powerful silhouette of the column, which delimits the space of the foreground, introduces a pronounced element of “classicizing academism” into the compositional structure of the picture. But the stylistic features of academism are even more visible in the images of musicians. The pose of a girl playing an ancient stringed instrument (a kind of zither) is borrowed from works of classical art. Quite traditional is the colorful range, built on a combination of dull blue and dark cherry tones, acquiring a special depth against the background of a light sky. With a special grace inherent in Khudyakov, the coloring is enriched with interspersed with modest jewelry gleaming with gold in the girl's clothes. The sonorous accents of red (a bow in the girl's hair, a rosette on the boy's clothes) seem to "collect" hot tones, enliven a slightly monotonous range. The white kerchief around the girl's neck is masterfully painted, giving the image of the musician a touch of artistry. The intricately nuanced cold silver-gray, bluish tones of the scarf emphasize the tenderness of the swarthy blush on the young face. A minor note in the interpretation of the image of the musicians is introduced by the image of a marble sarcophagus. The relief on its side wall reproduces the figures of the heroes of the picture in a reduced scale and mirror image. The painting “The Traveling Musicians” from the Ulyanovsk Museum is a complete and, in its own way, perfect work of academic painting of the late 1850s, with its tendency to plots from the life of the “common people”, painted in sentimental tones.