Konstantin Alekseyevich Korovin
Paris, Boulevard des Capucines
1911
oil on canvas
65 x 80.7 cm
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Korovin is one of the best representatives of Russian impressionism. It is odd that he should have adopted an Impressionist view of nature before discovering that it already existed in French art. Korovin’s landscapes in the final years of the first decade of the 1900s and also the 1910s, particularly his representations of Paris at night, are characterized by very bright and intense colours. They follow the Impressionist tradition of painting with dabs of colour. The painter succeeded in creating the illusion of a street full of passers-by, an image that is almost tangible, and that makes it possible for viewers to readily imagine themselves entering the universe depicted. Korovin does not appear to have selected typical landscape subjects, because reality as transfigured by the painter’s vision and emotions elicits through his palette not only poetry, but light and joie de vivre. The painter’s own words characteristically report that, “We need paintings that speak to the heart and that the soul responds to... We need light, we need more joy and more light.”