Gevorg Bashinjaghian was a landscape painter. He graduated from the Tiflis Art School. He also studied at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts under Mikhail Konstantinovich Klodt. The artist lived and worked mostly in Tiflis. His works are kept in the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Museum of Oriental Art, the National Gallery of Armenia and other collections.
The Armenian artist Gevorg Bashinjaghian went down in the history of art as the founder of Realistic landscape in Armenian painting, who introduced the national art of Armenia to Russian and European painting traditions.
Bashinjaghian studied at the Academy of Arts — the center of training for young artists of different nationalities living in Russia. He studied landscapes by old masters from the Hermitage collection and was fascinated with the works of Russian Romantic artists Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky and Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi, as well as artists of the Barbizon School and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. All this contributed to the impression that Bashinjaghian’s works absorbed the worldwide experience of landscape painting.
At the end of the 19th century, Bashinjaghian began to paint his Lake Sevan cycle. He had multiple variants of one view and series of works, which was characteristic of Romantic painters, as he depicted Lake Sevan at different times of day and throughout seasons. This allowed him to show the same motif in its constant impermanence, expressing the idea of nature always changing and having many faces.
The artist’s creative approach to painting a night landscape was constructive and based on his memories and imagination. It involved making a study to capture the state of nature first and then working in the studio to finalize the landscape image. This work method, formed in the early period of the artist’s career, was characteristic of Russian and European romantics. The landscape “Night over Lake Sevan” is also endowed with romantic ideas.
The artist interpreted the space in his own way: the open foreground produces the participation effect, while the middle ground shows a mysterious lonely island under the cover of night. With this arrangement, Bashinjaghian almost succeeds at creating the balance between the main parts of the painting. For him, it is an opportunity to build within a large landscape a “synthesizing” image of nature, majestic in its pristineness yet consonant with the emotional state of the human soul at the same time.
The perception of depth is enhanced by the color palette of the landscape — dark brown tones, other shades close to them and the yellow-orange disk of the moon.
