Water in Russian Painting: Symbol, Spirit, and Reflection

The text below is the excerpt of the book The Russian Painters of Water (ISBN: 9781639199686), written by Sutherland Lyall, published by Parkstone International.

Water is key to the formation of the world and human society. It is one of the four primeval elements from which, people once believed, the whole world was made. Water certainly was – and still is – the principal force whose eroding power forms the features of the land over eons of geological time. Today it separates the earth’s continents from each other. The first human settlements were made near water, beside lakes, rivers and sea shores. According to various ancient beliefs, water once drowned the whole world, and then receded to allow humankind to make a fresh beginning.

Water is still used to baptise people into various religions. It is the giver of life and the bringer of death. Without it the human body survives for just two days. It irrigates food crops and yet it may impartially obliterate thousands of people in a single tsunami. Frozen as snow and ice, it vanquishes armies. As fog it can make even brave sea captains fearful.

Water embraces all extremes from limpid tranquillity to cataclysmic violence. It is therefore not surprising then that water has been a pervasive element in art, architecture and landscape design. It has been used to symbolise the source and sustenance of life.

It has served as a represent ation of nature’s mysteries, as a physical barrier and boundary, and as sparkling decoration. Painters have been fascinated with its misty, reflective qualities, and its ability to underline and sometimes represent a whole range of emotions. As marsh and lake, mist and snow, puddle and ocean, waterfall and driving rain, deadly flood and slow moss-banked stream, it has an extraordinary diversity of forms. But because it is contained and defined by the very land it has shaped, it can never exist entirely in isolation. Water always needs a physical or meta phorical container: it can exist meaningfully only within a context. For these reasons, the represent ation of water in painting is most frequently as an element of nature, implying that it is best understood in terms of landscape painting.

But this is not exactly always the case because water is also frequently employed in a symbolic way. In Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, for example, the iconography of the myth demands that the sea be present because that is where Venus has sprung from – although in terms of composition the sea serves as an almost heraldic background device.

In the Curradi Narcissus at the Source, it is only a small part of the painting and yet we know that it is the water that initiated the whole process which leads the young man in the most extreme of transformations from human to vegetable form. In the Curradi painting it is not only the water but also the landscape that is an adjunct to the painting of the main figure.

But it is in paintings of nature – landscapes or seascapes – that water is deployed most expressively, whether it is in the glowing landscapes of Claude Lorrain, or in a painting such as Arkhip Kuinji’s The Birch Grove. In this, scarcely differentiated from the meadow to each side, the stream is used as a compositional device to lead the viewer’s eye into the centre of the painting to create the extraordinary sense of depth which astonished the artist’s critics.

In the great range of sea paintings by the prolific Ivan Aivazovsky, it is significant that he chose the sea as the setting for his almost abstract The Creation of the World. Here a mysterious red magma boils in the middle of an uncertain black cloud on the face of the water’s seething vapour, with a febrile sun breaking through the cloud to cast a dim light on the heaving waters. This is God moving on the face of the Deep.

In Isaac Levitan’s Beginning of the Spring, three forms of water – cloud, river and snow – are (apart from the brown branches recently released from their icy covering) the sole visual components of a painting to do with awakening and, perhaps, regret. And there are, as we shall see, many other variations in the use of water that painters have developed.

Levitan, Kuinji and, in a different way, Aivazovsky painted water with a peculiarly Russian eye. They are as it happens painters of the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. One of the reasons Russian paintings of waterscapes and landscapes are of a relatively late date is that from the beginning of the eighteenth century Peter the Great and almost all of his successors in that century forced the Old Russia into a western mindset. Russian art was entirely derivative of European models and at first largely filtered by a Prussian vision, because Peter had brought in masters from Germany to teach aspiring Russian artists the ways of the West. As a result, the nation’s artists were encouraged to think of themselves as part of the European mainstream, and were given grants to live, observe and paint abroad for long periods of time. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with a new western interest in landscape and landscape painting, Russian artists began to both value and encourage the painting of nature, mountains and water.

At first this was landscape viewed through the filters of a western-trained eye and consisted mostly of idyllic European scenery. But by the end of the century, Russian painting of water and land had become to do with the Russian landscape and identifiably took on a uniquely Russian character.

What was it about Russia itself that focused the attention of so many of its painters on water?

The country has the Pacific Ocean to the far east, and to the west is the Baltic Sea, with its gateway St Petersburg and the naval port of Kronstadt. South is the warm Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, with their resorts and trading ports fed by the great, broad waterway of the River Volga, which bisects the country into the East and West Empire. To the north, beyond the great wastes of the Siberian tundra, are the cold seas that form the mostly frozen Arctic Ocean. During the long winter, as Napoleon and Hitler discovered to their cost, much of Russia is frozen over.

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