The study Youth of St. Sergius was painted by artist Mikhail Nesterov in 1891. The picture portrays old Russian hieromonk Sergius of Radonezh as an adolescent. Nesterov created the study while he was working on a major canvas, the painting Youth of Venerable Sergius, which took him five years to complete.
Youth of St. Sergius
Creation period
1891
Dimensions
80x45 cm
Technique
Oil on canvas
Collection
Exhibition
17
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Mikhail Nesterov
Youth of St. Sergius
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Nesterov painted a few pictures dedicated to Venerable Sergius – they are all included in the Sergius Cycle. For the artist, the saint was the embodiment of moral ideal and a spiritual guide during hard times for Russia, when society especially needed unity and cohesion.
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The painter was a church-going believer. He often attended divine service at the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius that had been founded by Sergius of Radonezh, and liked to take walks about Sergiyev Posad and the nearby town of Khotkovo.
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The study is a full-length image of juvenile Sergius. The neutral background is traced in rough strokes and is devoid of any detail. This makes the picture stylistically look like an icon. Brightly-colored lush grass is painted in the lower part of the canvas. It is remindful of the earth as it is conventionally depicted in icons. Delicate buds of white flowers appear here and there in the grass.
Young Venerable Sergius of Radonezh has light-brown hair and large blue eyes, which reflect his inward detachment from the world. The artist turned to many models to mold the saint’s face. Among them was even the painter Apollinary Vasnetsov. After a few failed attempts, Mikhail Nesterov painted the saint’s face from an unknown young girl.
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Mikhail Nesterov was born in 1862 in Ufa, to a merchant’s family of a patriarchal lifestyle. A gift for drawing revealed itself when the painter was still a student in high school (called “gymnasium”). When Mikhail Nesterov was 14, he moved to Moscow to study at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He had famous Russian painters Vassily Perov, Alexei Savrasov and Illarion Pryanishnikov as his mentors. Landscapes were Mikhail Nesterov’s first canvases, but even in his earliest works he had a penchant for Christian topics. In addition to painting pictures, Mikhail Nesterov created church murals: Between 1891 and 1895, he took part in the decoration work at the Cathedral of St. Vladimir in Kiev and the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ (Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood) in St. Petersburg.
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Venerable Sergius lived in the 14th century. He was born near Rostov, ‘from noble and right-believing parents, ” reports his hagiographer Epiphanius the Wise. When St. Sergius was 23, he became a monk and went to live in a forest; he spent there a few years alone as a hermit. Other monks came to live near Sergius’s cell, and soon, the Trinity Monastery was built in that place.
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Youth of St. Sergius
Creation period
1891
Dimensions
80x45 cm
Technique
Oil on canvas
Collection
Exhibition
17
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