Semen
Fedorovich Shchedrin

The son of a soldier of the life guards Preobrazhensky regiment. In 1759 he entered the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, and in 1765 graduated with a gold medal and an invitation to continue studying abroad. Shchedrin decided to go to Paris and then to Rome. In Paris he studied the works of old and contemporary artists. Under the influence of the Enlightenment, the idea of beauty not only in classical areas of art, but also in everyday life and nature, Shchedrin worked more in the open air. In Rome he came under the influence of the classicism ideas that art should reflect the works of antiquity, and thus continuing their success. He was not able to overcome this effect. Shchedrin returned to St. Petersburg in 1776 and became a Professor of landscape painting at the Academy of fine Arts.

The founder of Russian landscape painting, first Professor of a new landscape class at the Academy, Sam. Shchedrin learned several generations of artists. Spent their compositional scheme of the landscape for a long time was exemplary. His paintings were reproduced in engravings and was a great success. Landscape-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 Preobrazhensky life guards regiment. In 1759, he enrolled at the Academy of arts, in 1765, received the gold medal and left pensioner abroad - first in Paris, then in Rome.

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

In Rome, Shchedrin was in the situation of the nascent classicism for which real life needed a lot of "amendments" antiquity. Here Shchedrin delayed beyond the period of his pensionerstva for four years.

Returning to St. Petersburg in 1776, he began to lead the class of landscape painting at the Academy and, in addition, when "the Cabinet of Her Majesty" Catherine II wrote the kinds of suburban palaces and parks.

With the 1780s, Shchedrin, and more engaged in restoration of paintings at the Hermitage, and in 1799 he headed a new additionally, the landscape engraving class at the Academy.

The flowering of his art had in the 1790s Among his works the most famous series of views of Pavlovsk, Gatchina and Peterhof parks, views of 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 from which man and his creations are a harmonic confluence. The composition is built in accordance with the rules of academic classicism: "the scenes"trees in the foreground (in earth tones); architecture in the second, Central (in green tones); given, usually shallow, on the third (in blue tones). The trees are depicted in a semi-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 in the works of his pupils and successors.