20 December 2024 – 30 March 2025
Curators: Anna Korndorf, Sergei Kuznetsov
From 20 December 2024 to 30 March 2025 In artibus Foundation will show the exhibition A Hymn to Jan Chrucki’s ‘Quiet Life’. It will be the first retrospective of this scale by the artist and includes works from more than fifteen Russian museum and the collection of the National Museum of the Republic of Belarus in Minsk. However, this broad scope does not mean that the exhibition space on Prechistenskaya Embankment will be full of paintings. In fact, the artistic legacy of master of the still life Jan Chrucki is distributed across the entire former Russian Empire, from Kraków to Krasnoyarsk and from St Petersburg to Yerevan and also in private collections, including in Poland, Germany, Czechia, the US and the UK. Only a small number of museum collections, primarily the National Museum of Belarus, the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery and the National Gallery in Warsaw, have a range of paintings by this wonderful artist, whose extant works number fewer than 100. And only in Minsk can one see them in all their glory in the permanent exhibition. Chrucki’s ‘insignificance’ for the Russian viewer is largely explained by the artist’s biography, in which even today there are numerous omissions.
The son of a Uniate priest and szlachta [Polish noble], he was born in the town of Ulla (now Vitebsk Region) and received a Catholic upbringing at Polotsk Higher Piarist College. He was educated in art even before arriving in St Petersburg. The young man considered himself a landscape specialist and in setting off for the Russian capital was of the opinion that he only required a little refining of his talent, for which there was no better place than the Academy of Arts.
In 1827 (or 1829) Jan Chrucki arrived in the capital of the Russian Empire, where he spent, including a break, around fifteen years. Here he was known as Ivan Fomich and he was a probationer at the Academy rather than a student. He spent many hours at the Hermitage copying Dutch and Flemish paintings in the imperial collection. Chrucki frequently took part in Academy exhibitions and won medals on more than one occasion. In 1839 he became an Academician. The artist’s paintings were praised by the press, and he amassed clients and admirers. During these years Chrucki became a national treasure not only of Polish, Belarusian and Lithuanian culture but also of Russian. However, in 1844 the artist left St Petersburg for good for the territory of White Ruthenia, where he worked with Bishop Semashko in Vilno on numerous church and private commissions, and in 1854, after around eight years of service, he returned to his estate at Zakharnichi near Polotsk and ceased painting.
The exhibition includes more than twenty of Chrucki’s works in various genres, which demonstrate all of his spheres of interest other than religious painting. For historical reasons, despite the fact that religious commissions were the artist’s main form of activity, today of the 100 or so extant works by Chrucki, which are distributed worldwide, there are only two compositions created for the church.
Chrucki’s portraits will be represented by several canvases from various periods, including official portraits and intimate compositions linked to the artist’s family circle. One of the jewels of the exhibition is a portrait of an unknown man from the State Historical Museum, which will be shown for the first time.
To mark the exhibition, In artibus and Inna Bazhenova paid for the restoration of Chrucki’s Portrait of Childrenfrom the Kursk Deineka Picture Gallery. Naturally, the exhibition will include the artist’s signature still lifes. His largest compositions include the wonderful painting Vegetable Stall, the only one of his works acquired by the Academy of Arts for its collection. Chrucki’s numerous flower compositions are smaller-format works that are more typical of his oeuvre. They include two versions of his famous Still Life with a Candle (Lornette) of 1839, which the artist painted eight times and for which he became known as ‘the Aivazovsky of flowers and fruits’. For a long time there was no particular object that was unique to Chrucki’s works. This role would go to a pottery jug from the Poskochin Factory which he depicted in a series of compositions, and which can be seen at the In artibus Foundation not only in paintings but in real life.
The exhibition will also reflect the genre ‘girl with basket’, an audience favourite, the quiet ‘domestic’ interiors of the artist’s estate and even landscapes. It will include an album of lithographs of views of Vilno and the surrounding area, two of which are based on paintings by Chrucki.
Lenders:
State Tretyakov Gallery
State Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus
State Historical Museum
Radishchev Art Museum, Saratov
Museum of the Academy of Arts
Volgograd Art Museum
Yekaterinburg Art Museum
Krasnoyarsk Art Museum
Kursk Deineka Picture Gallery
Taganrog Picture Gallery
Tula Art Museum
Pushkin House (Museum of the Institute of Russian Literature)
Vyatsk Art Museum
Russian Art Center, Kaliningrad
and other museums and private collectors
Quote: ‘the master has used the talents of his brush to produce entire bouquets and baskets of flowers in a way that is beautiful and deceptive to the eye. There are even glasses of water for drinking with fruit, as people with good taste do, and fruit knives, as used by those who do not know how to eat it. Here [. . .] there is a certain type of life, the life of plants, an appetising bringing to life, and if, like Chrucki, one can create the magnetic correlation between the viewer’s stomach and the subject of the painting, painstakingly selected at a fruit stall, then something elegant will always result.’[1]
[1] Biblioteka dlia chtenia, vol. 37, 1839, 48–49.
