The battle paintings of Vasily Vereshchagin and Horace Vernet in the Context of Rhetorical Confrontation of Russian and French Imperial Ambitions

Abstract

The article is devoted to some aspects of Vasily Vereshchagin’s reception in the context of Russian-French artistic and diplomatic relations of the 19th century. Particular attention is paid to an incident, which took place at the exhibition of Vereshchagin’s Turkestan series in St. Petersburg in 1874, when General Kaufman among other officials condemned some of his battle paintings. The article is intended to reconstruct the incident and give a new explanation for this negative reaction. Through the comparative analysis of battle paintings of Vereshchagin and Horace Vernet and taking into account the political confrontation between Russia and France in the 19th century, I suggest the following hypothesis. The comparison of Vereshchagin with Vernet, which was widespread among their contemporaries, played a special role at the exhibition in 1874. Thanks to a visitor to Vereshchagin’s exhibition, a French ambassador Le Flo, this comparison became a form of ambiguous diplomatic statement and reflected the opposition of French and Russian imperial ambitions. And it was one of the factors that provoked the Russian officials to criticize Vereshchagin’s battle scenes.