Venetsianov knew the peasants of his village individually - and in his best portraits, that is how he painted them. He conveyed their personal qualities, just as other portrait painters set out to convey the individual character of noblemen. This psychological aspect was revolutionary for its day, when, with few exceptions, portraitists turned out generic 'peasant types'. Venetsianov focused on the close-up face, forcing viewers to confront the peasant and look him in the eyes, inviting them to enter his inner world. Venetsianov also pioneered the naturalist school of landscape painting in Russia. The character of the Tver countryside - its subdued greens and quiet earth colours - can be seen in all his work. He conveyed the vastness of the Russian land by lowering the horizon to enhance the immensity of the sky over its flat open spaces - a technique derived from icon painting and later copied by epic landscape painters such as Vrubel and Vasnetsov. Unlike the artists of the Academy, who treated landscape as mere background and copied it from European works, Venetsianov painted directly from nature. For The Threshing Floor (1820) he had his serfs saw out the end wall of a barn so that he could paint them at work inside it. No other painter brought such realism to his depictions of agricultural life. In Cleaning Beetroot (1820) he makes the viewer look at the dirty callused hands and exhausted expressions of the three young female labourers who dominate the scene. It was the first time that such ugly female forms - so foreign to the classical tradition - had appeared in Russian art. Yet these sad figures win our sympathy for their human dignity in the face of suffering. Venetsianov's elevated vision of human toil was most apparent in his many images of peasant women. In perhaps his finest painting, a symbolic study of a peasant with her child, In the Ploughed Field: Spring (1827) (plate 4), he combines the distinctive Russian features of his female labourer with the sculptural proportions of an antique heroine. The woman in the field is a peasant goddess. She is the mother of the Russian land.
<p>5</p>Compared to their parents, the Russian nobles who grew up after 1812 put a higher valuation on childhood. It took a long time for such attitudes to change, but already by the middle decades of the nineteenth century one can discern a new veneration of childhood on the part of those memoirists and writers who recalled their upbringing after 1812. This nostalgia for the age of childhood merged with a new reverence for the Russian customs which they had known as children through their fathers' household serfs.
In the eighteenth century the aristocracy had seen childhood as a preparation for the adult world. It was a stage to be overcome as soon as possible, and children who delayed this transition, like Mitrofan in Fonvizin's The Minor, were regarded as simpletons. High-born children were expected to behave like 'little adults' and they were prepared to enter into society from an early age. Girls were taught to dance from eight years old. By the age of ten or twelve they were already going to the 'children's balls' that were run by dancing masters in the fashionable houses, from which, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, they would graduate to their first grown-up ball. Natasha Rostov was relatively old, at eighteen years, when she attended her first ball and danced with Prince Andrei in War and Peace. Boys, meanwhile, were signed up for the Guards and dressed in their regimental uniforms long before they were old enough to hold a sword. Volkonsky joined his father's regiment (a sergeant in absentia) at the tender age of six. By eight he was a sergeant in the Kherson Grenadiers; by nine, an adjutant to General Suvorov; although, of course, it was only later, at the age of sixteen, that he began active service on the battlefield. Boys destined for the civil service were sent to boarding school at the age of eight or nine, where they were indoctrinated in the service ethic and, like adult State officials, they wore a civil (rather than a school) uniform. School was seen as little more than an apprenticeship for the civil service and, since the student was allowed to join the service on his fifteenth birthday, few noble families thought it necessary to educate their sons beyond that age. Indeed, in so far as the Table of Ranks reinforced the principle of promotion by seniority, any further education was
considered disadvantageous: the sooner one got on to the promotion ladder the better.
