The Birth of the National History of Art
	Juta Kivimäe

	The birth of professional Estonian, national art is connected with the work of the painter Johann Köler (1826-99) and St.Petersburg, the capital of the Russian empire. From 1848 to 1855, Köler studied at the St.Petersburg Academy of Arts in the studio of professor A. Markov. The St.Petersburg academic school, and his later close acquaintance with the heritage of classical Italian art helped Köler develop into a highly sensitive artist and a remarkable colourist with fixed preferences. The highlights of his life were receiving the titles of academician and professor at the Academy of St.Petersburg, his several extremely successful, intimate portraits of women and heroic landscapes of the Crimea, typical of that period. Köler visited Crimea many times in the company of the Tsarist family because he was the drawing teacher of the grand duchess Maria Aleksandrovna.
	In his foreign travels, especially in Italy, Köler was influenced by Garibaldi's liberation movement and acquired ideas which were quite democratic for the period. After the 1863 and 1864 tours at home, he brought a group of patriots together in St.Petersburg. Thanks to Köler's connections in the circles of the academe and authorities of the empire's capital, he was able to procure permission to set up the Estonian Writers' Society, newspaper Sakala and the Alexander school. He also supported various petitions written by peasants, which were the signposts of radical reforms in Estonian national culture during the 1860s. Between 1860 and 1870, Köler was one of the most prominent painters in St.Petersburg. His psychologically convincing portraits, free of classicist canons of form, mainly depicted outstanding personalities in Russia like statesmen, scholars, artists and musicians. He also painted portraits of people who were closely connected with Estonia, for example Ella Schultz-Adajewsky, a pianist and composer from Tartu; Philipp Karell, the Tsar's personal doctor of Estonian origin; and Friendrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, the creator of the Estonian national epic. Most of Köler's work remained unknown in his homeland during his lifetime. Estonians associated his name with the fresco that was executed for the Kaarli church in 1879. This church was the first in Tallinn that was built with publicly collected money especially for an Estonian congregation.
	Another follower of the classicist style was August Weizenberg (1837-1921), founder of Estonian sculpture. Weizenberg, who came from the family of a shoemaker, started his independent career as a cabinetmaker's apprentice. In the early 1860s, he worked as a cabinetmaker in Berlin, and in 1865 he managed to become an audit student at the St.Petersburg Art Academy. He began his studies at the Munich Academy of Arts in 1870 and he finished them in 1873. The long period he spent as a freelance painter in Rome (1873-90) deepened Weizenberg's passion for the classicist ideal of beauty. The figural compositions from the Carrara marble depicted scenes and persons from Estonian mythology (Linda, Vanemuine, Koit and Hämarik) or biblical scenes (Christ and Barrabas). His figures of children as allegories of time: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter are his most remarkable works. Between 1880 and 1890, Weizenberg portrayed various prominent Estonian cultural personalities like Fr.R. Kreutzwald, the linguist F.J. Wiedemann, the natural scientist K.A. Baer, poets Lydia Koidula and Anna Haava. August Weizenberg, a person of wide cultural interests and many talents, published numerous articles in the newspapers. He has also written fiction, plays and poems and composed solo songs. In the early 20th century, his sculptures adorned the Tartu Vanemuine theatre and the Tallinn public library, thus offering many Estonians their first contact with national art.
	The academic-salon like style of the sculptor Amandus Heinrich Adamson (1855-1929) was shaped at the St.Petersburg Academy of Arts, and through the influence of the neo-baroque trend, which spread in Paris in the last decades of the century. Coming from a poor seaman's family, he too had to start his independent life as an artisan. After years of working as a cabinetmaker's apprentice in Tallinn and St.Petersburg, he was admitted to the St.Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1876. He studied sculpture under the supervision of professor A.F. von Bock, who was of Baltic German extraction. He graduated in 1879 with the Academy's big silver medal. From 1887 to 1891 Adamson lived in Paris and later travelled to Italy on numerous occasions. Adamson's allegorical compositions reflect the influence of the salon art. The Ship's last Sigh, The Wave's Only Kiss, The Listener of the Sounds of Sea, etc. were inspired by the romantic topic of the sea.
	His work also includes various figural compositions which quite realistically depict the everyday life of coastal Estonians e.g. A Seal-Hunter from the Pakri Island, Anxious Waiting, and The Muhu Fisherman. Adamson's monumental work is represented by The Mermaid near Kadriorg beach in Estonia, and the Monument to Sunken Ships in Sevastopol. Between 1913 and 1917, Adamson was sculpting the huge monument to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in St.Petersburg. Due to the ensuing revolutionary events, the monument was left unfinished, and in the face of financial ruin, the aged sculptor was compelled to return home. In the 1920s, Adamson produced a number of monuments on Estonian town squares and cemeteries, including many monuments to the War of Independence. Most of the latter was destroyed by Soviet authorities after the Second World War, and restored in the early 1990s.
	Besides the St.Petersburg Art Academy, the parallel centre of art education where young people from mostly Baltic German families went to study, was the D¥sseldorf Art Academy. By that time, it had already lost its brilliant reputation. It was still popular in the Baltic provinces of the Russian empire, however, because a large part of the professors were of Baltic origin. The D¥sseldorf school advanced academism towards moderate realism, following the example of the 17th century Dutch masters.
	Paul Raud (1865-1930) became one of the most influential figures in Estonian art at the turn of the century. He graduated from the D¥sseldorf Art Academy in 1894. Raud was a student of professor E. von Gebhardt, a painter of historical-religious compositions who was of Baltic origin. After graduation, Raud returned home and attempted to earn his daily bread by portrait painting; he was the first Estonian artist to do so. Since he was close to the Baltic German circles whom he portrayed in the pre-First World War period, Paul Raud, differently from his twin brother Kristjan Raud, remained distanced from the national liberation movement at the turn of the century. In 1911, Raud became certified as a drawing teacher at the St.Petersburg Academy, and from 1914 he worked as a drawing teacher at the Tallinn Commercial Gymnasium for Girls. Later, in the 1920s, he worked at the State School of Arts and Crafts which had been established in 1913.
	Besides commissioned parade portraits, the more concealed side of Paul Raud's creativity was revealed in his peasant types (An Old Man of Muhu, Mother's Portrait), and in his small landscapes of Estonian islands (Repairing the Net, Farmyard etc.). He painted the former in a fresh and free manner and the latter in varying conditions of light and atmosphere. Through those intimate works which remained within the walls of the artist's studio for his lifetime, Paul Raud was paving the way for open air painting and impressionism in professional Estonian art.
	| Estonian Art 2/99 (6) | Published by the Estonian Institute 1999 | ISSN 1406-5711 | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |