Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
Only in these later days, when mankind begins to scrutinize its boasted glories more closely, do Tolstoi in literature and Verestchagin in art give us glimpses of the grim reality. An industry which has murder for its main output will have some by-products to match. In the armies of both sides the human stuff was of mixed character and motive.
Where have men written with such tragic intensity? Where has there been music suggesting such depths of sadness and of human passion? And who has ever told upon canvas the story of the battlefield with such energy and with such thrilling reality, as has Verestchagin?
There were, nevertheless, occasions when the inaction, following on intense æsthetic emotion, stayed Verestchagin's busy brush. One day, relates Madame Verestchagin, he went out to sketch the sunset: He prepared his palette, but the sight was so beautiful that he waited in order to examine it better.
Verestchagin, the great painter who knew the psychology of war as few have known, and went down to his death gloriously, as he should, on a sinking battleship, once said, "In modern warfare, when man does not see his enemy, the poetry of the battle is gone, and man is rendered by the Unknown into a quaking coward."
And assuredly no painter could do them justice, simply because paints and canvas are mediums far too coarse in which to reproduce the impression which such brilliance of light acting on a medium so fine as the thin air produces. The great Russian painter Verestchagin once visited Darjiling, and took his seat to paint the scene. He looked and looked, but did not paint.
Near the Nevski is a fine shop of pictures with snow scenes and blue rivers and Italian landscapes, and copies of Repin and Verestchagin, and portraits of the Czar. I searched here, but all were too sophisticated in their bright brown frames, and their air of being the latest thing from Paris and London.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking