Resisting Chauvinist Stereotypes: The Impertinence of Russian Painting at London’s International Exhibition of 1862

The Russian empire’s displays of applied and decorative art at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its immediate successors have long galvanised scholars for their semantic complexity. By contrast, Russia’s first selection of paintings for this fiercely competitive arena, shown at London’s International Exhibition of 1862, failed to ignite the public imagination and has largely evaded the historian’s gaze. While the three-dimensional artworks provided a recurrent source of wonderment for their superlative craftsmanship, stupendous materials, and often hyperbolic proportions, the paintings were apparently flat in every sense of the word: derivative, lacklustre, and incapable of capitalising on the opportunity that international exhibitions offered to present a national school. The dismissive comments they attracted set the tone for many later accounts, embedding the idea that Russian painting prior to the twentieth century was of limited consequence—a perception that would prove convenient to those asserting the originality of the avant-garde. Yet renewed consideration of Russia’s display of paintings in 1862 suggests that their critical reception speaks to concerns that went well beyond the pictures’ supposed obligation to represent a national school. Notably, a small but significant number of history and portrait paintings by academically trained and often well-travelled artists challenged notions of Russians as primitive and parochial. The technically adventurous of these parried the belief that Russian art was insufficiently mature to experiment in painterly effect. Most audacious of all, they broached unspoken national boundaries by daring to suggest that Imperial Russian artists could innovate in areas on which the success of British painting rested. The attitudes towards Russian painting in 1862 thus invite fresh scrutiny, revealing as they do a disruptive arena in which aesthetic rivalries and chauvinist sensibilities came to the fore.