Roman Viktorovich Mertslin was a major Russian landscape painter, grandson of the chemist Roman Mertslin. He was born in 1950 in Perm and graduated from the Saratov Art College. From 1976, Roman Viktorovich worked as a production designer on television. He is known as a master of the urban landscape and a wonderful portraitist. The artist’s urban landscapes began to appear at exhibitions in the late 1970s.
The researchers note that Mertslin’s paintings accurately express the very atmosphere of his time. There are no heroes in his landscape-genre compositions, only characters are depicted in them. These characters do not add anything significant to the prevailing tonality of his landscapes. Still, according to art critics, these characters allow for a greater variety of intonations, sometimes outlining a grotesque sharpening of the motif.
The work from the collection of the Voronezh Art Museum depicts the Saratov city landscape. The foreground is an open space with three snowdrifts. On the right there is a group of closely standing houses, against which stands a telegraph pole. Behind the fence on the left, roofs of houses are visible, and on the horizon appears the silhouette of a church. The building depicted in the center of the painting is the native home of the painter Pavel Kuznetsov. The manor’s construction dates back to the end of the 19th century. The house and the plot of land originally belonged to Kuznetsov’s parents Varfolomey Fedorovich and Evdokia Illarionovna Kuznetsova. The Saratov city authorities decided to demolish the building, and Roman Mertslin, as part of the support for the action of the local activists to save the architectural heritage of the city, created a series of works depicting this example of architecture of the 19th century. At the end of the 20th century, the building was almost completely destroyed. In 1988, the site and the dilapidated building were transferred to the Radishchev Museum for the reconstruction of the Kuznetsov Museum, who spent his childhood and youth in his parents’ house. The Voronezh Regional Art Museum named after Ivan Kramskoy acquired the work in 1986 from Roman Viktorovich Mertslin himself.
Mertslin died in Saratov in 1999.
