An Independent Spirit

Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge was not born of the usual artist stock. And art was not a love from childhood, but a passion discovered in adulthood. Nonetheless, in a career that spanned the entire second half of the 19th century, Ge turned out to be one of Russia’s most influential and gifted artists.

Nikolai Ge was born in Voronezh on February 15, 1831. His was a noble family of foreign provenance, but one thoroughly russified. His great-grandfather was a member of the French gentry who emigrated to Russia during the French revolution. Ge’s father was a military officer and, ironically, returned to the family’s roots as part of the Russian force occupying Paris after Napolean’s defeat in 1814. Ge’s mother was also of foreign extraction—the daughter of a Pole exiled to Russia. She died when Ge was just three months old and Nikolai was brought up by a nanny who became his surrogate mother.

When Ge’s father retired from the army, he settled with his son in the Mogilev uezd of Podolsk guberniya (present-day Ukraine) and took up farming. He was a diligent and entrepreneurial farmer, doubling the size of his estate and increasing his revenues ten-fold. Yet, he was also known as a cruel barin who beat his serfs for the smallest misstep. Ge inherited his father’s penchant for rural life, but reacted against his despotism. When he found that his beloved nanny had been flogged for some minor transgression, it was enough to set him against serfdom decades before its abolition.

Ge began his higher education at the Kiev gymnasium in 1841. There he studied under the famous historian Nikolai Kostomarov and began to develop a deep understanding of history that would later inform his art.

In 1847 Ge began studies in the department of mathematics at Kiev University. In 1848 he transferred to St. Petersburg University, still pursuing mathematics. He was on the well-worn path of a young nobleman—a military or civil service career was just around the corner.

But fate had other plans. Ge befriended Parmen Zabello, a student at the Imperial Academy of Arts. It was to be a fortuitous friendship that brought two new loves into his life. First, in 1850, Ge quit the university (without completing his course in mathematics) and enrolled in the Academy of Arts. It was an extraordinary thing for a young member of the gentry to do—the Academy’s students were mainly sons of the bourgeoisie, small functionaries, and low-ranking officers. Second, through Zabello, Ge met his future wife, Anna Zabello.

From his very first days in the Academy, Ge was attracted to the art of Karl Bryullov (see Russian Life, Jan/Feb 2000). He considered himself a student of Bryullov’s, even though he never met him personally, and he sought for his art to embody the same emotional power and realism. After five years of hard work, Ge graduated from the Academy, awarded a little gold medal for his canvas “Achilles Mourns over the Death of Patroclus.” The medal entitled Ge to a year of study abroad, but the independent-minded artist refused the opportunity, saying that one year abroad was not enough time to accomplish anything of value.

On October 28, 1856, Nikolai and Anna were married in Chernigov gubernia. That same month, the artist completed his painting “Endor’s Medium Calls the Spirit of Samuel” (also known as “Saul and the Medium of Endor”). The painting was based on the biblical story (1 Samuel 28) in which Saul asks a medium to call forth the spirit of his father, Samuel, who then tells Saul he will die the next day. The painting earned Ge the coveted big gold medal from the Council of the Academy of the Arts and a six-year grant to study in Italy.

At first, Rome overwhelmed Ge. While he did many sketches, landscapes and portraits, he had a hard time settling on a theme for his work. It brought him to the brink of despair: “I wanted to return to Russia and say that I was returning empty-handed, because I discovered that I had no artistic talent,” he wrote.

Then, in January, 1861, Ge met Leo Tolstoy in Rome. The encounter marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship that would have a huge impact on Ge’s work. Its immediate effect was to bring focus to Ge’s artistic efforts. In August, 1863 he completed “The Last Supper,” one of his most outstanding creations. In this work, Ge captured the deep psychological drama in the schism between former “brothers-in-faith” — Judas and Jesus.  As he would write: “The images of Christ, John, Peter and Judas became crystal clear to me, as if they were alive ... I saw the scene where Judas leaves the Last Supper and we witness a complete rupture between Judas and the Christ. Judas was a good disciple of Christ, but he could not understand Christ, just like materialists can’t fathom the idealists ... So, I saw in it the misery of the Savior who is once and for all losing his disciple — a man ... And there was my painting! In about a week I painted the entire work without any sketches. Karl Bryullov was right: two-thirds of one’s work is done when the artist approaches the canvas ...”

So strong an impression did the painting make that, within a month, the Council of the Imperial Academy awarded Ge the title of Professor of Historical Art. It was a title most artists had to work decades to earn, and he received it at the age of 32. Moreover, in February of the following year, Emperor Alexander II purchased Ge’s “Last Supper” for the museum of the Academy of Arts, paying 10,000 silver rubles (36,000 in paper rubles). It was a princely sum.

“The Last Supper” became one of the most famous paintings of its time, leaving no observer indifferent. The psychological drama and themes it represented became a lightning rod for domestic philosophical debates, which ran deep in the wake of the abolition of serfdom three years earlier, in 1861. As one contemporary observer put it: “For the first time you see in the lugubrious and austere figure of Judas not just someone full of petty ambitions, but rather an indomitable fanatic who saw in his master a rival going against his convictions. The canvass shows the moment of rupture between a disciple and his teacher. In the painting one sees an original independent master and it is a surety that he will follow his own path and will remain faithful to himself and the severe truth of his subjects.”

During the several years which followed “The Last Supper,” Ge lived a rather calm and secure life. As a professor at the Art Academy, he met and cooperated with the artist Ivan Kramskoy and the members of the St. Petersburg Artists’ Workshop (“Artel”), who were reacting against the restrictive traditions of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

In February, 1864 Ge returned to Italy. There, in Florence, he continued to focus on biblical subjects but also painted portraits of Russian revolutionaries and dissidents, like Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Hertzen. This was a rather daring thing for a professor of the Imperial Academy to do, but it was totally in keeping with Ge’s independent spirit. Appropriately, his portrait of Hertzen earned him considerable renown, some even comparing him with Rembrandt for his use of color and for the psychological depth of the work.

By 1869, Ge had tired of his life abroad, confessing, “the longer you live abroad, the more fervent a patriot you become ... it is seemingly because, the closer you look at it [foreign life], the more you see that it too is not all roses ...” He returned to Russia, he said “a perfect Italian seeing Russia in a new light.”

Russia was also seeing art in a new light. The realism inspired by Chernyshevsky and Belinsky led, in 1870, to the founding of the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions by the participants of Kramskoy’s Artists’ Workshop. Ge was elected to the group’s board. The Society’s first exhibition was held in November of the following year and one of its centerpieces was a new canvas by Ge, “Peter the First Interrogates Tsarevich Alexei in Peterhof.” The painting was immediately acclaimed as a work of genius and, like “The Last Supper” before it, became a focus for philosophical debate.

The painting struck a nerve not just because Russia was, at that time, preparing to celebrate the bicentennial of Peter I’s birth. It also symbolized Russia’s eternal struggle with reform, of the social battle between “fathers and sons” which was taking shape, the battle between the old and the new.

During his reign, Peter I had instituted unprecedented political, economic and social reforms, never blanching at their human toll. Alexei (from Peter’s first marriage to Eudoxia, whom he had despised and subsequently sent to a nunnery) lacked his father’s vigor and insatiable appetite for learning, and was in fact a lazy ne’er do well. He resisted all of his father’s attempts to mold him in his image and quite naturally grew to despise everything Peter stood for.

In 1715, Peter wrote Alexei an ultimatum. In it, Peter said he regretted that his heir apparent was “totally unworthy” of state affairs and threatened to strip Alexei of his right to the throne. He ended the letter with the now famous (and ominous) words: “For I never spared my life for the sake of my fatherland or my people, so how would I spare you, you wretch. Better a good man of another’s breeding, than a wretch of one’s own.” In his written reply, Alexei renounced his right to the throne citing “poor health and a weak memory.” Peter, unsatisfied with this reply, told Alexei he either had to accept his duty or enter a monastery. Alexei pledged the latter but then fled to Europe with his lover, a serf Efrosinya Fedorova.

In Europe, Alexei became the focal point and organizer of Russia’s anti-reform forces, taking part in a conspiracy against his father. Peter learned of the plot and convinced the tsarevich to return to Russia, promising to spare his life. Yet, on his return, Alexei was promptly arrested and proven guilty in the plot against the crown. Peter’s assurances notwithstanding, the Supreme Court of Russia condemned Alexei to death. But the tsarevich did not withstand the tortures inflicted upon him (and which his father attended), and died in Peter and Paul Fortress.

Ge’s painting interprets that painful and dramatic moment in this incredible historical event when the father and sovereign confronts his son and heir with the proof of his treachery. As critic Vladimir Stasov wrote at the time, “A fearsome tsar sits by the table where lie the letters proving that the tsarevich is guilty of intrigues and betrayal. His son stands before him, repenting sincerely — or not — tall and emaciated, the true figure of a dumb, narrow-minded little dyak [clerk]. A father and his son. There is no one else in this low room with a cold marble floor and Dutch paintings on the wall. But what drama is in the offing! It is as if two human extremes were brought together from different parts of the world. One embodies the very meaning of energy, an indomitable and powerful will ... who turned his beautiful, heated head towards that son of his, that unreasonable man, that enemy who attempted to stand in his way. His eye burns with ire, reproach and hatred. The colorless head of the young criminal bows and falls under this look. ... He is good for nothing, he is despicable, he is a villain in his poverty and old-believer-like cowardice.”

Such strong reactions to Ge’s masterpiece were typical. However, later Ge had to admit that: “I nurtured some sympathy for Peter, but then, upon studying numerous documents, realized there should be no room for sympathies...”

The strength of the painting is in the subtle, restrained manner in which Ge presents his subjects. Peter is not towering over Alexei, shouting with operatic anger; Alexei is not cowering on the floor, begging for mercy. As the writer Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote, “anyone who sees these two simple figures, not at all strikingly arranged, will inevitably realize that he has been witness to one of those staggering dramas which are never expunged from the memory.”

Crowds flocked to the painting at the exhibition and Emperor Alexander II and Grand Prince Nikolai Konstantinovich both ordered author’s copies of the painting.

Ge lived in St. Petersburg for four more years. Two more historical canvasses followed, “Catherine the Second at the Coffin of Elizabeth Petrovna” (1874) and “Alexander Pushkin in Mikhailovskoye” (1875), but neither drew the level of attention of Peter and Alexei. The public was beginning to lose interest in historical painting and Ge, for his part, was losing a desire to satisfy the public’s expectations. Seeking a change in his life, at the age of 46 he left the capital and moved to a small estate (khutor) in Chernigov guberniya. He longed for the low cost of living and artistic freedom that rural life would offer. Over the next five to six years, he rarely left his estate and the capital’s art world gradually forgot about Nikolai Ge.

Ge did continue painting, however. In March, 1882, he visited Tolstoy in Moscow and in October, 1884, Tolstoy visited Ge in Chernigov. The growing friendship resulted in one of the best extant portraits of Tolstoy and in Ge embracing Tolstoy’s anti-materialist views. In March 1886, Ge renounced all of his possessions and focused on learning a trade—that of oven maker. He did not, however, give up painting, but instead returned to the earlier, spiritual themes in his work, such as his October 1886 canvas “Repentant Sinner,” (inspired by Tolstoy’s story of the same name), and “Christ and his Disciples Going to the Garden of Gethsemane after the Last Supper” (1888).

But Ge’s next major masterpiece was unveiled in February, 1890, at yet another (the 18th) Itinerant exhibition in St. Petersburg . “‘Quid est Veritas?’ [What is the Truth?] Christ and Pilate” presented a defiant, realistic Jesus that contravened the normal canons. Here Christ is not surrounded with a halo, but is disheveled and his eyes burn with revulsion. Not surprisingly, such realism was not appreciated by the conservative Tsar Alexander III, who did not share his father’s love for Ge’s work. The painting was banned and removed from the exhibition. Tolstoy intervened, calling the painting “an epoch in the history of Christian art,” and art patron Pavel Tretyakov purchased the work and placed it in his famous gallery. Moreover, on August 8, 1890, Tolstoy wrote to the well-know American traveler George Kennan, asking for his help exhibiting the canvas in America. As a result, it toured in Baltimore and Boston.

A year later, Ge’s personal life was shattered when his wife of 35 years, Anna Petrovna, passed away on November 4, 1891. “It feels so hard,” he wrote, “and it will probably feel so till my last day.”

Ge had just three years to live himself. But he still had new and startling creations to offer. The first was his “Portrait of Natalia Petrunkevich, Konisskaya in Marriage” (1893). At first glance it is merely a prosaic portrait of a noblewoman reading by a window, with the last light of day illuminating the garden behind. And yet, as Ilya Repin wrote to Tatyana Tolstaya at the time, “it has a huge artistic scale, a novelty and strength worthy of a young and not of an old man.” Indeed, the painting, with its almost impressionistic style, seems more a work of the 20th than the 19th century.

At the same time, Ge was working on two paintings on the last days of Christ. In “The Crucifixion” (1892) and “Calvary” (1893, unfinished), Ge presented a Christ devoid of his deity, in whom suffering has become all too real. Ge’s intent was clear: “I shake their brains with the sufferings of Christ! I force them to suffer and not be moved! Coming away from the exhibition, they will forget their stupid concerns for a long time.” He wrote Tolstoy that “Calvary” made him cry whenever he worked on it.

Tsar Alexander III was not so moved by Ge’s work. He called “The Crucifixion” “some sort of carnage,” and it was barred from public exhibition. Ever the perfectionist, Ge destroyed this painting and began work on a new rendition. But it was never completed. On June 1, 1894, at the age of just 63, Nikolai Ge died unexpectedly, his independent spirit preserved until the very end.  RL

Semyon Ekshtut is a historian specializing in 19th and early 20th century Russia. He is a frequent contributor to Russian Life. His article on Karl Bryullov was published in the Jan/Feb 2000 issue of Russian Life. Nikolai Pavlenko also contributed to this article.