At the Doors of a School
Artist: Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky
Year of creation: 1897
Exhibited at: State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia)
Following his own childhood hardships, Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky grew a deep love for portraying peasant children and rural schools in his works, thus earning himself the moniker “an artist of the people.” One of his images, titled At the Doors of a School, depicts a lowborn boy, perhaps the artist himself, who hesitates to enter a classroom full of better-dressed, diligent students after having seemingly traveled a long way. The painting refers to the time when education was not accessible to all, even less so for peasants, but was still the only escape to a larger world.
Mental Arithmetic. In S. Rachinsky’s Free School
Artist: Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky
Year of creation: 1895
Exhibited at: State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia)
Mental Arithmetic. In S. Rachinsky’s Free School by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky, 1895, State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia). Credit: Tretyakov Gallery / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Of the same authorship, Mental Arithmetic illustrates an arithmetic class at a 19th-century rural school. A group of students are running their brains at full power to solve a mathematical problem chalked on the board. Remarkably, the teacher in the painting (to the left) is written off the artist’s real-world teacher Sergey Rachinsky, who left academia to teach kids in the countryside. He was also the one who authored this exact equation puzzling the minds of the youngsters in the image – the one, which includes all types of arithmetic calculations and has at least four possible solutions.
Student
Artist: Nikolai Yaroshenko
Year of creation: 1881
Exhibited at: State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia)
Student by Nikolai Yaroshenko, 1881, State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia). Credit: The Yorck Project / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Girl Student by Nikolai Yaroshenko, 1883, Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts (Kaluga, Russia). Credit: The Yorck Project / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Student is regarded as one of the pinnacles of Nikolai Yaroshenko’s creativity. It is a portrait of a young student, poor but nevertheless ambitious, – a true face of his generation. The enigma the character has to him evokes a strong association with Dostoyevsky's Rodion Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment – so, it is no wonder that it is often chosen as the book’s cover. The image has its counterparts: one of them, Girl Student, with two versions exhibited at the Kyiv Art Gallery and the Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts, portrays the dawn of education for women when female students were first granted the right to receive higher education as part of the Higher Women’s Courses.
Low Marks Again
Artist: Fyodor Reshetnikov
Year of creation: 1952
Exhibited at: State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia)
Low Marks Again by Fyodor Reshetnikov, 1952, State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia). Credit: Фёдор Павлович Решетников / Wikimedia Commons
This artwork was created during the Soviet period, when education was made compulsory and free for everyone, and depicts the drama of a schoolboy who returns home with a bad grade. Not everyone knows this, but this painting is actually the second in a series, which also includes Arrived on Vacation (1948) and Failed Exam (1954) – interestingly, the second and third parts of the series feature reproductions of the author’s earlier works.
Want to know more about art? Discover Russian artists and their works via our Russian art tag and explore the gems of St. Petersburg’s museums in our Top Five Exhibits series.
Title image credit: At the Doors of a School by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky, 1897, State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia). Credit: art-catalog.ru / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
