Nikolay Nikanorovich Dubovskoy is a bright representative of the Russian landscape painting school who lived and worked at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Dubovskoy created over four hundred paintings and almost a thousand sketches. For a long time, the painter was a member of the Itinerants and later became the leader of this one of the most influential unions of painters of the time. He was the head of the landscape painting workshop of the Imperial Academy of Arts and facilitated the opening of the Arts Museum at his home city of Novocherkassk. Nikolay Dubovskoy continued the traditions of panoramic landscape painting inherited from his teacher Mikhail Konstantinovich Klodt, a Russian landscape painter and member of the academy.
Nikolay Dubovskoy achieved his first success and received enthusiastic comments from art critics after he presented his painting The Winter in a traveling exhibition in 1884. The works that followed — The Early Spring (1886), Calm Before the Storm (1890), The Morning in the Mountains (1892), — brought real glory to the artist.
The painter created The Seashore. Sunset in 1895. Nikolay Dubovskoy admired the sea before sunset and was skilled in depicting its beauty in his works. The scene is simple and laconic: the evening sun glimpsing through the clouds, the calm and majestic sea, the lopsided fishermen’s huts on the shore — all of that creates an incredibly integral romantic mood.
Impassionate emotionless presentation of nature was alien to Nikolay Dubovskoy, so, along with Isaak Ilyich Levitan and other outstanding members of the Itinerants, he created and developed the mood landscape as a new stream in Russian fine arts. The painter could miraculously feel the hidden meaning in every detail of nature, and he skillfully correlated it to human feelings and emotions.
The light, air and space are the key components of Nikolay Dubovskoy’s landscape paintings that make it easy to recognize his works. The artist meticulously worked on the lighting effects, admired the calm — ‘still’ — conditions of nature, and often added a light shade of romance to the paintings, Dubovskoy paid special attention to depicting the sky in his works. In many of them, it became the key elements of the landscape and its most expressive part.
Nikolay Dubovskoy became one of the most important figures in Russian fine art of the late 19th and the early 20th century, and his contribution to the development of painting in Russia is invaluable. His works were highly praised by his equally prominent contemporaries and respected by later generations. Paintings by Nikolay Dubovskoy are exhibited in major Russian and international art galleries.
Nikolay Dubovskoy achieved his first success and received enthusiastic comments from art critics after he presented his painting The Winter in a traveling exhibition in 1884. The works that followed — The Early Spring (1886), Calm Before the Storm (1890), The Morning in the Mountains (1892), — brought real glory to the artist.
The painter created The Seashore. Sunset in 1895. Nikolay Dubovskoy admired the sea before sunset and was skilled in depicting its beauty in his works. The scene is simple and laconic: the evening sun glimpsing through the clouds, the calm and majestic sea, the lopsided fishermen’s huts on the shore — all of that creates an incredibly integral romantic mood.
Impassionate emotionless presentation of nature was alien to Nikolay Dubovskoy, so, along with Isaak Ilyich Levitan and other outstanding members of the Itinerants, he created and developed the mood landscape as a new stream in Russian fine arts. The painter could miraculously feel the hidden meaning in every detail of nature, and he skillfully correlated it to human feelings and emotions.
The light, air and space are the key components of Nikolay Dubovskoy’s landscape paintings that make it easy to recognize his works. The artist meticulously worked on the lighting effects, admired the calm — ‘still’ — conditions of nature, and often added a light shade of romance to the paintings, Dubovskoy paid special attention to depicting the sky in his works. In many of them, it became the key elements of the landscape and its most expressive part.
The Seashore. Sunset is no exception. The cirrus clouds lit by the evening sun resemble a featherbed and create the feeling of lightness. The aeriality and soaring effect is emphasized by the subtle light and shade gradations. All items seem to be dissolving into thin air, merging with sunlight and acquiring some special meaning.
Nikolay Dubovskoy became one of the most important figures in Russian fine art of the late 19th and the early 20th century, and his contribution to the development of painting in Russia is invaluable. His works were highly praised by his equally prominent contemporaries and respected by later generations. Paintings by Nikolay Dubovskoy are exhibited in major Russian and international art galleries.
