Before confession Alexey Korzukhin (1835-1894)
Alexey Korzukhin – Before confession
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Painter: Alexey Korzukhin
Location: The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (Государственная Третьяковская галерея).
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Korzukhin is a Russian artist who created in the style of genre painting. His paintings are distinguished by their attention to detail, lightness of hand, and subtle knowledge of aspects of life of different estates of the time - the peasantry, the merchant class, and the nobility. Everywhere he describes some characteristic scenes, without turning to mythical or religious themes. It was his predilection for vitality that made him a participant in the "rebellion of the fourteen", when fourteen young artists walked out of the Academy of Fine Arts at once, protesting against injustice. That year the Academy was one hundred years old and held a competition for the best painting.
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Description of Alexei Korzukhin’s painting Before Confession
Korzukhin is a Russian artist who created in the style of genre painting. His paintings are distinguished by their attention to detail, lightness of hand, and subtle knowledge of aspects of life of different estates of the time - the peasantry, the merchant class, and the nobility. Everywhere he describes some characteristic scenes, without turning to mythical or religious themes.
It was his predilection for vitality that made him a participant in the "rebellion of the fourteen", when fourteen young artists walked out of the Academy of Fine Arts at once, protesting against injustice.
That year the Academy was one hundred years old and held a competition for the best painting. All genre painters were assigned the same theme - "The Feast at Valhalla." After several petitions and requests to be allowed to choose the theme themselves, the most freedom-loving students, Korzukhin among them, left the Academy for good.
"Before Confession" is one of his famous paintings. It depicts a small temple. Icons on the walls in gilding. Candles in lamps and candlesticks are burning. Behind a put up screen, which fenced off a small nook, a priest is getting ready.
In front of the screen are parishioners who want to go to confession. A few neat old ladies in scarves, an old man, a young lady in rich clothes, waiting with an aristocratic sense of dignity. And the children - a little worried, huddled against the adults, listening to the last admonitions - perhaps, for some of them, this is their first confession, and they are painfully going over their actions, looking for sins. Is it a sin to slap Fedka’s neighbor’s ear? Stealing an apple from the orchard - a sin?
Waiting rings in the air, the rest of the temple is hidden in semi-darkness - people move there too, but you can’t see them so well and understand what they’re doing. The abundance of detail, the facial expressions make the picture come alive. You can make up a story for each character in it - or better yet, a dozen stories.
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The picture has something of this: people, group, woman, seat, many, man, furniture, wear, room, priest, royalty, monarch, kneeling, Mary.
Perhaps it’s a painting of a group of people standing next to each other in a room with a clock on the wall and other people standing around the room.