Semen Fedorovich Shchedrin (1745-1804)

The founder of Russian landscape painting, the first of a new professor, landscape class at the Academy, Sam. Shchedrin learned several generations of artists. The spent their compositional scheme of the landscape for a long time was exemplary. His paintings were reproduced in engravings and enjoyed great success. Landscape and species painting and murals, written by him and his students, and decorated the palaces of the capital, and the landed estates.

Shchedrin was the son of a soldier of the Life Guards regiment. In 1759, he enrolled at the Academy of Arts, in 1765 received a gold medal and left pensioner abroad - first in Paris, then in Rome.

In Paris, he studied and copied other people's work, wrote a lot from nature - probably under the influence of enlightenment ideas to look at not only the beauty of the classic design, but also in reality.

In Rome, Shchedrin was in the situation of the nascent classicism for which real life is in need of significant "amendments" antiquity. Here Shchedrin delayed beyond the time of their pensionerstva for four years.

When he returned to St. Petersburg in 1776, he became head of the landscape painting class at the Academy, and, in addition, at "Her Majesty's Cabinet," Catherine II wrote kinds of suburban palaces and parks.
From the 1780s. Shchedrin doing more and restoration of paintings at the Hermitage, and in 1799 headed by the new addition, engraving landscape class at the Academy.

The peak of his creativity comes to the 1790s. Among his most famous series of Pavlovsk, Gatchina and Peterhof parks, views Stone Island and decorative panels for the Mikhailovsky Palace in St. Petersburg. Shchedrin captures specific types of architectural structures, but the main role was played not by him, and the natural environment with which the man and his creations are a harmonious merger. The composition is built in accordance with the rules of academic classicism, "scenes"-trees - in the foreground (in earthy tones) architecture of nature - in the second, the central (in shades of green) gave generally shallow - on the third (in blue tones ). The trees are depicted in conventionally decorative manner. Types of cozy, balanced, they have a charm of opening a new sense of nature, the integrity of perception, soft lyricism.

However, in comparison with the best West European landscape artists of the time Shchedrin looks more timid student. Gradually, the situation will change, but already in the works of his pupils and successors.