Sylvester Shchedrin

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Self-portrait

Sylvester Feodosiyevich Shchedrin (Russian: Сильвестр Феодосиевич Щедрин; 13 February 1791 - 8 November 1830) was a Russian landscape painter.

Sylvestr Shchedrin was born in St. Petersburg into the family of the famous sculptor Pheodosiy Shchedrin, rector of the Imperial Academy of Arts. The landscape painter, Semion Shchedrin, was his uncle. In 1800, Sylvester Shchedrin entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, where he studied landscape painting. Among his teachers were his uncle, Semion Shchedrin, Fedor Alekseev, M.M. Ivanov and Thomas de Thomon.^[1]. In 1811e graduated with several awards including the Large Gold Medal for his painting View from Petrovsky Island that gave him a scholarship to study abroad.

Lake of Albano, 1825

Sylvester left for Italy in 1818, delayed due to the Napoleonic Wars. In Italy, he studied the old masters in Rome; goes to Naples to paint watacolrs ordered by Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich of Russia;^[1] then return back to Rome. The biggest achievement of that period was New Rome. castle Sant'Angelo (1823) It was such a great success that he has painted 8..10 variations of the painting, each from a slightly different angle and with different details.^[2] His pension ended in 1823, but he decided to stay in abroad as a freelance painter. In 1825 he finished his work Lake of Albano that was a new step in his movement to the natural composition. In this painting he relaxed the boundary between subject and background, moved from using the formal colors.^[3]

Shchedrin had many commissions and grew to become a well-known artist in Italy. He lived in Rome and Naples, working en plein air, drawing bays and cliffs and views of small towns and fishermen villages. One of his favorite motifs were terraces in vines with a view of the sea. Referred as the images of the "Midday Paradis".^[4] At the end of the 1820s, Shchedrin began to draw nighttime uneasy, almost nightmarish landscapes, which may have been inspired from his gradually declining health. He died in Sorrento in 1830. In a sense works of Shchedrin concluded the whole period of developing of Russian art and started the new period in its development.^[1]

Moon Night in Naples, 1828

Shchedrin influenced not only the Russian art but Italian art as well. He was one of the founder of the so called Posillipo school.^[4] Many of his works are in Italian museums while some were returned to Russia. Shchedrin's letters full of important artistic observations were published as a book (Shchedrin Letters from Italy) in 1932 and reprinted in 1978.^[4]