Vasily Yakovlevich (William Baltazarovich) Beringer was a painter, mosaicist and teacher. He was born in 1875 in a small village called Alexanderhilf (near Odessa), where German settlers resided in the 18th century during the rule of Catherine the Great. Beringer graduated from a drawing school in Odessa. In 1893, he entered the Higher Art School at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts. He studied under Pavel Osipovich Kovalevsky and Pavel Petrovich Chistyakov.
Symbolism in Russian art is associated with the development of romanticism in the first quarter of the 19th century. Symbolism enjoyed popularity in literature and fine arts in the period of the Silver Age, covering the early 20th century — right when Vasily Beringer began his career as an artist. Beringer became a famous artist of the time through his passion for poetry and theater, work in popular magazines and participation in exhibitions.
“Portrait of a Woman Wearing a Veil” is one of the examples of a symbolic “beautiful lady” image in Vasily Beringer’s works. The realistic portrait acquires a touch of romanticism through the theatricalization of the sitter’s clothes, her dramatically tense posture and the anxiety in her blue eyes, looking to the right.
The portrait “Woman Wearing a Veil” highlights the artistic qualities of the artist’s dense, relief strokes and sense of color. The face is the main part of the composition and is painted in an academic manner using a meticulous modeling method. The clothes, inspired by Eastern motifs, and the background are depicted in a less reserved way — from the detailed ornamentation of the turban made by precise brush strokes to the smoothly depicted veil. The color palette with its complex combination of bluish-pink and greenish-violet tones is especially close to Beringer’s compositions, filled with symbols and metaphors.
Theatricality as a way of embellishing reality was characteristic of separate works of Art Nouveau and Symbolism. The woman in the portrait might have been an actress, as Beringer was known for depicting actresses. For example, he painted “Ida Rubinstein as Cleopatra” in 1915.
