Summerfolk

A corresponding change can be observed in visual representations of the city and its outskirts. Early paintings of St. Petersburg offer “elemental” views, which typically exaggerate the width of the Neva, emphasize the river’s importance by crowding it with ships, and provide a few grand facades on the embankments as the only evidence of lasting human intervention in the landscape. Over time, as the city territory was more densely settled and the natural elements were seen to have been tamed, came a shift to representations that emphasized rather the city’s more “civilized” aspect, its straight lines, open spaces, and imposing grandeur. Later still, in the first part of the nineteenth century, norms changed again as artists began to abandon the distant, all-encompassing, admiring perspective on the city and instead to adopt a more intimate and “enclosed” viewpoint.25. These long-term aesthetic trends had direct implications for the way artists depicted the city’s outskirts. A bleak view reminiscent of the earlier eighteenth century is the Swedish artist Benjamin Paterssen’s View of the Outskirts of Petersburg by the Porcelain Factory (1793). Paterssen was a prolific painter of the city’s central areas, such as the Admiralty and Senate Square, but in this work he shows a flat and empty rural scene with carriages heading both toward and away from the city and a peasant woman and child wandering along the side of the roadway; the left side of the painting is dominated by a river, here associated not with the granite grandeur of the city but with the Finnish fishermen who are often counterposed to it in the Petersburg myth.

But Paterssen himself was at the forefront of a new trend that emerged at the turn of the century: suddenly artists were not so reluctant to present views of suburban life or to draw such a sharp distinction between city and noncity scenes. The first examples of the genre were paintings of aristocratic suburban residences such as the Stroganov dacha, painted by Andrei Voronikhin in 1797 and by Paterssen in 1804. These paintings were, however, in the same distanced style as the austere early representations of St. Petersburg’s central squares and embankments. More striking were depictions whose foregrounds were filled with scenes of suburban life. Paterssen’s View of Novaia Derevnia (1801), for example, has some people strolling along the embankment of Kamennyi Island in small family groups. But, although this is a location detached from the city, formality has not been abandoned. Families are dressed smartly, as for a stately promenade; although some people are clearly in gentle motion, they are depicted as static, without individualizing gestures that might hint at a narrative; and two uniformed figures on horseback hover at the entrance to a neatly tree-lined avenue. Moreover, the location, though certainly not urban, is hardly secluded and private: as these well-to-do families stroll, they are approached by peddlers, and on the opposite bank of the Neva they are faced by the densely settled Novaia Derevnia, by all appearances a well-appointed suburb. By 1804, in his picture of the Kamennyi Island Palace from Aptekarskii Island, Paterssen was taking a significantly different approach. The palace is in this case merely a pretext: it is, admittedly, located in the center of the picture, but in the distance, almost on the horizon. The foreground is dominated by a scene of domestic activity on the near shore. Here there are four groups of figures and two distinct narratives. A woman greets or takes leave of a uniformed man at the steps to her family’s residence; and a cabriolet sets off, pursued by a dog and watched by a woman with three children. Both the woman and her children are dressed informally; and the unconstrained domesticity of the scene is emphasized by the uncluttered view of the opposite bank, by the sparse and unsculpted arboreal backdrop, and by the indistinct boundary between road and grass verge.26

В. Paterssen, View of Novaia Derevnia from Kamennyi Island (1801). Courtesy of State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford (171 c.229).