Description of the painting and Fedotova's fresh gentleman. Eternal consequences of revelry

The painting “Fresh Cavalier (Morning of the Official Who Received the First Cross)” by P. A. Fedotov is the first work of the everyday genre in Russian painting, painted in 1847. The canvas was highly praised by critics and among progressive-minded intellectuals.

The plot and composition of the painting clearly shows the influence of English artists - masters of the everyday genre. On the canvas we see an official, with difficulty coming to his senses the morning after a cheerful feast organized on the occasion of receiving his first order.

The official is depicted in squalid surroundings, in an old robe, barefoot, with curlers on his head and with an order pinned directly to his robe. Haughtily and reluctantly, he argues about something with the cook, who shows him her fallen boots.

Before us is a typical representative of his environment - a corrupt bribe-taker and a slave to his boss. Immensely arrogant, he idolizes the order as if it were evidence of some unprecedented merit. He probably flew very high in his dreams, but the perky cry of the cook immediately brings him back to his place.

The painting “Fresh Cavalier” is an accurate reproduction of reality in its entirety. In addition to his excellent command of writing technique, Fedotov demonstrates the subtlety of psychological characterization. The artist depicts his hero with amazing sharpness and accuracy. At the same time, it is obvious that the artist, while denouncing his character, at the same time sympathizes with him and treats him with gentle humor.

In addition to the description of P. A. Fedotov’s painting “Fresh Cavalier,” our website contains many other descriptions of paintings by various artists, which can be used both in preparation for writing an essay on the painting, and simply for a more complete acquaintance with the work of famous masters of the past.

In our new section, we will tell and show the most significant paintings for the events of our history and not only try to decipher the colorful details that are well understood by the artist’s contemporaries, but also show that paintings often live for a very long time and reflect problems that are well known today. Let's start with the eternal topic - Russian bureaucracy. Even today it is by no means ideal and often comes across various abuses. 170 years ago, during the time of Emperor Nicholas I, the shortcomings of the officials were much the same as what the observant artist Pavel Fedotov showed in his timeless painting.

Ironic realist

Pavel Andreevich Fedotov (1815-1852), who lived only a short time, but managed to become famous, was the first in the Russian everyday genre to try to give a critical analysis of everyday life. The painter's father was a military man, and Fedotov himself served in St. Petersburg, where he attended evening classes at the Academy of Arts. In 1846, he created his first significant painting, “The Fresh Cavalier.” In 1848, the no less famous “Matchmaking of a Major” was written. The paintings of the first years were characterized by irony and poignancy of plots, and later Fedotov mastered the art of psychological drama, as exemplified by his later paintings “The Widow” (1851) and “The Players” (1852). The artist’s images hit the mark - already at the end of the 1840s, many painters appeared who imitated Fedotov.

Pavel Fedotov, “Major's Matchmaking” (1848)

Eye of censorship

Fedotov’s painting, painted in 1846, bore several titles: “Fresh Cavalier”, or “Morning of an Official Who Received the First Cross”, or “Consequences of a Revel”. Now it is kept in the State Tretyakov Gallery.

The first sketches of the future masterpiece appeared in the early 1840s. On the advice of fabulist Ivan Andreevich Krylov, Fedotov decided to develop the plot and rework the sketches into a full-fledged canvas. After the painting was ready, the artist presented it at the Academy of Arts, where it was highly appreciated. In 1847, “Fresh Cavalier” was presented to the public and caused a real sensation, bringing fame to its creator. But censorship immediately drew attention to the painting: the removal of lithographs from it was prohibited because of... the disrespectful depiction of the order.

gloomy morning

All three titles of the picture tell about its plot. We see an ordinary average official the morning after he received his first order and celebrated such an important event. The Order of St., which offended censorship, Stanislav 3rd degree was the lowest in the hierarchy of state awards and was often used to distinguish officials.

Such a small award contrasts on the canvas with the very appearance of the newly minted gentleman: a proud and swaggering expression on his face, the pose of a Roman senator, wrapped as if in a toga, and not a shabby robe, and an order attached not to the uniform, but the same robe - all this should cause in the viewer a feeling of contradiction and inconsistency between the event and its perception by the main character.

But the irony of the maid depicted to the left of the order bearer completely coincides with ours, the viewer’s. A simple maid, in front of whom the gentleman displays his robe, looks at him with undisguised mockery and, defiantly holding the owner’s old worn-out boots in her hands. The comical nature of the image of an official who imagines himself an important bird after receiving a minor award is emphasized by the curls in his head (maybe with a hangover the hero turns into a laurel crown?) and his bare feet.

Pavel Fedotov, “Fresh Cavalier” (1846)

The environment around also shows the contrast between the gentleman's attitude towards himself and the harsh reality. There is mismatched furniture in the order bearer’s room, there is terrible chaos everywhere, things are scattered. On the table we can see the sausage left over from the party, lying not on a plate, but on a newspaper, and not simple, but on the Gazette of the St. Petersburg City Police. There are skeletons of herrings and shards of broken dishes lying around the table. A guitar with broken strings leaned against a chair. A skinny mongrel cat is tearing at the upholstery of a chair.

All this taken together is a pitiful sight, but it does not prevent the newly minted gentleman from cherishing his ambitions. He dreams of being no worse than everyone else and keeping up with metropolitan fashion - the hair curling iron, mirror and shaving accessories lying on the table tell us this. Fashionable and book - a moralizing novel by Thaddeus Bulgarin, close to the authorities, “Ivan Vyzhigin”. But the book is lying under the chair - it seems that our hero could not master it either.

Pavel Fedotov's painting is incredibly rich in telling details (which generally distinguishes the everyday genre in painting). “Fresh Cavalier” allows us to judge the life of St. Petersburg officials in the 1840s, who were capable of receiving an order, but who actually lived in poverty and were spiritually poor. Today, by the way, it is much more difficult to obtain an order than in 1846, but the morals, conceit and manners of bureaucrats have not changed very much. This is why the artist Fedotov, who died 165 years ago, is interesting to us.

Pavel Fedotov, “It’s all cholera’s fault!” (1848)

Fresh Cavalier (Morning of the Official Who Received the First Cross) is the first oil painting he painted in his life, the first completed painting.
Many, including the art critic Stasov, saw in the depicted official a despot, a bloodsucker and a bribe-taker. But Fedotov's hero is a small fry. The artist himself persistently emphasized this, calling him a “poor official” and even a “toiler” “with little support”, experiencing “constant poverty and deprivation.” This is too clearly evident from the picture itself - from the assorted furniture, mostly “white wood”, from the plank floor, torn robe and mercilessly worn boots. It is clear that he has only one room - a bedroom, an office, and a dining room; it is clear that the cook is not his own, but the owner’s. But he is not one of the last - so he snatched an order and splurged on the feast, but still he is poor and pitiful. This is a small man, whose entire ambition is only enough to show off in front of the cook.
Fedotov gave a certain amount of his sympathy to the cook. A good-looking, neat woman, with a pleasantly rounded, common-spirited face, her whole appearance demonstrating the opposite of the disheveled owner and his behavior, looks at him from the position of an outside and untainted observer. The cook is not afraid of the owner, looks at him with mockery and hands him a torn boot.
“Where there is a bad relationship, there is dirt on the great holiday,” Fedotov wrote about this picture, apparently hinting at the pregnancy of the cook, whose waist is suspiciously rounded.
The owner has decisively lost what allows him to be treated with any kindness. He filled with arrogance and anger and bristled. The ambition of the boor, who wants to put the cook in her place, rushes out of him, disfiguring, really, the very good features of his face.
The pitiful official stands in the pose of an ancient hero, with the gesture of an orator raising his right hand to his chest (to the place where the ill-fated order hangs), and with his left, resting on his side, deftly picking up the folds of a spacious robe, as if it were not a robe, but a toga. There is something classical, Greco-Roman in his very pose with his body resting on one leg, in the position of his head slowly turned towards us in profile and proudly thrown back, in his bare feet protruding from under his robe, and even tufts of curl-papers stick out from his hair is like a laurel wreath.
One must think that this is exactly how the official felt victorious, majestic and proud to the point of arrogance. But the ancient hero, rising among broken chairs, empty bottles and shards, could only be funny, and humiliatingly funny - all the wretchedness of his ambitions came out.
The disorder reigning in the room is fantastic - the most unbridled revelry could not have produced it: everything is scattered, broken, turned over. Not only is the smoking pipe broken, but the strings of the guitar are broken, and the chair is mutilated, and herring tails are lying on the floor next to bottles, with shards from a crushed plate, with an open book (the name of the author, Thaddeus Bulgarin, carefully written on the first page, - another reproach to the owner).

But while noting the commonality of Gogol’s and Fedotov’s types, we must not forget about the specificity of literature and painting. The aristocrat from the painting "Aristocrat's Breakfast" or the official from the painting "Fresh Cavalier" is not a translation into the language of painting of Gogol's sky-smokers. Fedotov’s heroes are not Nozdrevs, not Khlestakovs, not Chichikovs. But they are also dead souls.
It is perhaps difficult to imagine such a vividly and visibly typical Nikolaev official without Fedotov’s painting “Fresh Cavalier”. A swaggering official, boasting to the cook about the cross he received, wants to show her his superiority. The master's proudly pompous pose is absurd, just like himself. His arrogance looks funny and pitiful, and the cook, with undisguised mockery, shows him his worn-out boots. Looking at the picture, we understand that Fedotov’s “fresh gentleman,” like Gogol’s Khlestakov, is a petty official who wants to “play a role at least one inch higher than the one assigned to him.”
The author of the picture seemed to accidentally look into a room where everything was abandoned without the slightest attention to simple decency and basic decency. Traces of yesterday's drinking are visible everywhere: in the flabby face of the official, in scattered empty bottles, in a guitar with broken strings, clothes carelessly thrown on a chair, dangling suspenders... The pile of objects in "Fresh Cavalier", their unusually close arrangement (marked as negative quality even by Bryullov) is due to the fact that each item was supposed to complement the story about the hero’s life. Hence their extreme specificity - even the book lying on the floor is not just a book, but a very low-grade novel by Thaddeus Bulgarin “Ivan Vyzhigin” (the author’s name is carefully written on the first page), the award is not just an order, but the Order of Stanislav.
Wanting to be precise, the artist simultaneously gives a succinct description of the hero’s poor spiritual world. Giving their “replicas,” these things do not at all interrupt each other, but when collected together: dishes, remnants of a feast, a guitar, a stretching cat, they perform a very important role. The artist depicts them with such objective expressiveness that they are beautiful in themselves, regardless of what exactly they are supposed to tell about the chaotic life of the “fresh gentleman.”
As for the “program” of the work, the author set it out as follows: “The morning after the feast on the occasion of the received order. The new gentleman could not stand it: with the light he put his new thing on his robe and proudly reminds the cook of his importance, but she mockingly shows him his only and holey boots which she carried to clean."
After getting acquainted with the picture, it is difficult to imagine a more worthy brother of Khlestakov. Both here and there are complete moral emptiness, on the one hand, and arrogant pretentiousness, on the other. In Gogol it is expressed in artistic words, and in Fedotov it is depicted in the language of painting.

“Several times I wanted to find out why all these differences are happening. Why am I a titular councilor, why on earth am I a titular councilor? Maybe I'm not a titular adviser at all? Maybe I’m some kind of count or general, but this is the only way I seem to be a titular adviser. Maybe I myself don’t yet know who I am. After all, there are so many examples from history: some simple person, not so much a nobleman, but just some tradesman or even a peasant - and suddenly it turns out that he is some kind of nobleman or baron, or whatever his name is...”

It seems that at these words the small face of Gogol’s Poprishchin, clenched into a fist, suddenly smooths out, blissful contentment spreads over him, a lively sparkle lights up in his eyes, and he becomes taller, and his figure is different - as if he had thrown off his shoulders. along with his threadbare uniform, a feeling of his own insignificance, oppression, and wretchedness...

The plot of the film “Fresh Cavalier”

Just why did we remember Gogol’s hero when looking at Fedotov’s painting “Fresh Cavalier”? Here in front of us is an official who celebrated receiving the order. In the morning after the feast, not yet having slept properly, he put his new robe on his robe and stood in a pose in front of the cook.

Fedotov, apparently, was interested in a completely different subject. But what is a plot for a true artist! Isn’t this a reason, isn’t it a purely accidental opportunity to fashion such characters, to reveal such aspects of human nature, so that in a hundred and two hundred years, make people sympathize, be indignant, and despise those with whom they encounter as living creatures...

Both Poprishchin and Fedotov’s “gentleman” are kindred and close in nature for us. One manic passion controls their souls: “Maybe I’m not a titular adviser at all?”

They said about Fedotov that for some time now he began to live as a recluse. I rented some kind of kennel on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, damp, with children walking from the owner’s half, children crying behind the wall - and it works in such a way that it’s scary to watch: in the evening and at night - under lamps, during the day - in sunlight.

When one of his old acquaintances expressed his surprise, Fedotov began to speak passionately about the advantages of his current life. He did not notice the inconveniences; they simply did not exist for him. But here, on the 21st line of Vasilievsky Island, his natural inclination to observation finds constant food, there is more than enough material for creativity - his heroes live all around.

It is now that he is determined to start working in oils and present his first canvases to the public. Of course, these will be pictures of morals, scenes that he spied in life: one called “The Consequences of a Revel”, the second “The Hunchbacked Groom” (this is how the paintings “Fresh Cavalier” and “The Picky Bride” were originally called).

During the short hours of rest, Fedotov suffered from pain in his eyes. He put a wet towel to his head and thought about his heroes, first of all about the “gentleman”. The life of officials was familiar to him from childhood, from his parents’ house in Moscow.

Here, in St. Petersburg, there is a different spirit - a metropolitan one. The artist’s new acquaintances, from those who served in different departments, seemed to have been born officials. How they sit down when visiting, take a chair, how they talk to the janitor, how they pay the cab driver - by all their manners and gestures one could guess their rank and possible career advancement. Their faces, when they trudge to the department in the morning, wrapped in shabby overcoats, reflect only official concern, fear of a reprimand, and at the same time some kind of self-satisfaction. It is contentment... They consider the desire for all sorts of abstract benefits, of course, stupidity.

And among them there are funny ones, at least his “cavalier”.

Description of the main character of the picture

Fedotov arranged the picture in such a way, so saturated it with details, so that one could read it as a narrative about the life of this person, a detailed narrative and as if leading the viewer into the depths of the picture, so that the viewer was imbued with the very atmosphere of what was happening, so that he felt like an eyewitness - as if inadvertently a door to I opened it to my neighbor - and this is what appeared to his eyes. It is tempting and at the same time instructive. Yes, the scene before our eyes should teach. The artist believed that he could correct morals and influence human souls.

When one day Fedotov’s friends gathered, and among them the writer A. Druzhinin, the artist began to explain and explain the meaning of the paintings, as he himself understood them: “a reckless life.” Yes, both in “The Consequences of a Revel” and in “The Brokeback Groom” every viewer should see the harm from an imprudent life.

Until her gray hair, the bride went through suitors and now she has to choose the humpbacked celadon. And the official! Here he stands in the pose of a Roman emperor, barefoot and wearing curlers. The cook has such power over him that she laughs in his face and almost pokes him in the nose with a holey boot. A drinking buddy, a policeman, has fallen asleep under the table. On the floor are the remains of a feast and a rare guest in the house - a book. Of course, this is “Ivan Vyzhigin” by Bulgarin. “Where there is a bad connection, there is dirt on the holiday,” concluded Fedotov...

In spite of all the difficult circumstances of life, he believed in the inherently good nature of people, in the possibility of degeneration of the most evil and vicious of them; moral filth, vulgarity, he believed, were a consequence of disrespect for oneself.
With his art he dreamed of returning humanity to man.

Friends liked the picture about the official extremely because of its vitality and naturalness. Talking details that do not obscure the whole, humor and this feature - captivate, lure into the depths of the picture, let you feel the atmosphere of the event. It seemed to them that Fedotov’s moralizing, edifying interpretation did not reveal the full meaning of the painting. And time has confirmed this.

Fedotov exhibited his paintings to the public in 1847. The success of “The Revel” was so great that it was decided to remove the lithograph from the canvas. This made Fedotov extremely happy, because anyone can buy a lithograph, which means that the painting will be able to have an impact on many - this is what he was striving for.

It didn't work out. Censorship demanded that the order be removed from the official's robe, the attitude towards which was considered disrespectful. The artist tries to make a sketch and realizes that the meaning, the whole point of the picture, is lost. He abandoned lithography.

This story became known outside artistic circles, and when Fedotov exhibited the canvas for the second time in 1849 - and at that time the public’s mood was fueled by the events of the French Revolution - the painting was seen as a kind of challenge to the bureaucratic apparatus of Tsarist Russia, an exposure of the social evil of modern life.

Critic V.V. Stasov wrote: “Before you is an experienced, numb nature, a corrupt bribe-taker, a soulless slave of his boss, no longer thinking about anything other than giving him money and a cross in his buttonhole. He is ferocious and merciless, he will drown whoever and whatever you want - and not a single fold on his face made of rhinoceros skin will falter. Anger, arrogance, callousness, idolization of the order as the highest and categorical argument, a completely vulgar life - all this is present on this face, in this pose and figure of an inveterate official.”

...Today we understand the depth of the generalization given by the image of the “gentleman”, we understand that the genius of Fedotov undoubtedly came into contact with the genius of Gogol. We are pierced by compassion and the “poverty of a poor man,” for whom happiness in the form of a new overcoat turns out to be an unbearable burden, and we understand that on the basis of the same spiritual poverty, or rather, the complete lack of spirituality, oppression of an unfree person, mania grows.

“Why am I a titular councilor and why on earth am I a titular councilor?..” Oh, how scary this face is, what an unnatural grimace it distorts!

Gogolevsky Poprishchin, who cut his new uniform into a mantle, is removed and isolated by society. Fedotov’s hero will probably prosper, rent a brighter apartment, get a different cook, and, of course, no one will even say in their hearts: “Crazy!” And yet - look closely - the same dehumanized face of a maniac.

The passion for distinction, for rank, for power, lurking latently and growing more and more into a poor, wretched life, eats up and destroys a person.

We peer into "Fresh Cavalier" by Fedotov, a whole layer of life is exposed. The physiognomy of past centuries is outlined with plastic clarity, and in all the depth of generalization a pitiful type of self-satisfaction appears before us,