Art Appreciation
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was born on October 15, 1814, in Moscow, Russian Empire, and became one of the defining figures of Russian Romanticism.
His mother died when he was young, and he was largely raised by his wealthy maternal grandmother, Yelizaveta Arsenyeva, at her estate at Tarkhany. A sickly child, Lermontov made several trips to the Caucasus, whose mountains and people left a lasting impression on both his writing and visual art.
He received an extensive private education before entering a boarding school affiliated with Moscow University and later Moscow University itself in 1830. After leaving the university, he moved to St. Petersburg and entered military school, eventually becoming an officer in the Life Guards Hussar Regiment.
Although best remembered as the author of A Hero of Our Time and poems such as The Demon and The Death of the Poet, Lermontov was also an accomplished draftsman and painter. He reportedly began drawing at an early age and later received painting lessons from artist Pyotr Zabolotsky. His literary and artistic lives became intertwined with the Caucasus.
After writing The Death of the Poet in response to Alexander Pushkin's fatal 1837 duel, Lermontov was exiled to military service in the Caucasus. He returned there in 1840 following his own duel with Ernest de Barante, son of the French ambassador. These experiences supplied him with landscapes, soldiers, mountain communities and military scenes that appeared in his poems, prose, drawings and paintings. His second exile proved his last: Lermontov was killed in another duel at Pyatigorsk in 1841, at only 26.
As a visual artist, Lermontov worked across several media, including oil, watercolor, gouache, pencil, ink and sanguine, producing landscapes, portraits, battle scenes and travel sketches. His landscapes often use broad panoramic compositions, receding planes and atmospheric light to convey the scale and drama of the Caucasus—the same Romantic landscape that dominates much of his writing.
Among his best-known surviving works are View of the Caucasus with Camels (1837–1838), The Georgian Military Road Near Mtskheta (1837), A View of Krestovaya Mountain (1837–1838), View of Pyatigorsk (1837–1838), and his striking Self-Portrait (1837–1838), a watercolor showing Lermontov in military dress against the Caucasus Mountains. His Portrait of Shakespeare (1832), executed in pencil and sanguine, also demonstrates the range of his draftsmanship.
While literature secured Lermontov's place in Russian cultural history, his paintings provide a parallel visual record of the landscapes, people and Romantic sensibility that shaped his poetry and prose.
Sources:
Wikipedia
https://www.tretyakovgallerymagazine.com/node/3306
https://www.tretyakovgallerymagazine.com/articles/4-2019-65/lermontov-landscape-issue-attribution-relating-two-watercolour-landscapes
https://www.culture.ru/persons/8188/mikhail-lermontov