Alexei Harlamov in his picture Italian Girl with a Tambourine portrays a girl standing at full length against wildwood and holding a tambourine in one of her hands over her head. There are a creek and a small fall of water down to her left and a bright green lizard on the branches to her right in the middle. The theme of the picture was explained by art critic Andrey Ivanovich Somov, who saw the picture at the 11th Itinerants Exhibition in 1883 and described it at length: ‘Harlamov sent to the exhibition three pictures from Paris, not bad on the whole but in no way augmenting his reputation of “Russian Bonnat”. Looking at his Italian girl aiming a blow at a lizard with her tambourine’, […] one can wonder if it was worth taking such a big canvas for such a trivial theme and parading his blunder to such an extent? ’
But whereas the Russian critic thought the theme trivial, the French press reacted differently. Thus, French critic T. Veron, who saw the picture at a Salon exhibition in Paris in the previous year of 1882, wrote in his review: “An encounter with a beautiful green lizard creeping along opaque or reddish autumn branches. This is an encounter of an Italian girl sidewise, who is staring at the emerald of a small lizard. Excited, she skims her tambourine with tiny silver bells in the air and gives it lots of noise mating. The image of the girl targeting a thick red tree is very attractive. A.Harlamov is an impassioned and powerful colourist”.
Now, over a hundred years on, one can clearly see the silhouette of a figure behind her back. Harlamov either initially introduced another character and then covered it with paint or the girl’s position in the picture had been different. To some extent, this may explain his miscalculations in the position of her arm, which looks unnaturally short, and in the position of her figure, which is in the centre but a bit backwards. Incidentally, these flaws in the picture were at once noticed by the then critics. Thus, critic Vladimir Sizov maintained that ‘the picture seems technically incomplete’.
