Girl with porcelain

Creation history

In 1913, a chronic heart disease forced Alexander Golovin to leave Saint Petersburg and move to Tsarskoye Selo. The paintings Golovin created in the 1910s retained the modernist stylistics but acquired distinct features of neoclassicism. The color palette of his works is lighter, with the artist favoring local colors, calmer compositions, and models depicted in characteristic poses but within "everyday situations".

According to Ida Gofman, making children's portraits was typical for artists at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In her view, painters used children's portraits to escape anxious thoughts and complex emotional experiences. In this regard, Golovin's portrait is a rare exception. Painted a year before the revolutionary events of 1917, it reflects not only the artist's inner world, enamored with beauty and dreaming of harmony, but also acutely conveys the contradictions of the social life of his time, according to Gofman.

Still life attracted many Russian artists of the early 20th century, regardless of their artistic movements. Golovin had liked flowers since childhood, and had seen exotic specimens through the glass of a greenhouse at the Petrovsko-Razumovskoye estate. He grew flowers himself, carefully selecting varieties, loved painting bouquets, and incorporated flowers into his portraits. In his early 20th-century portraits, flowers typically served as decoration, ornament, or pattern. In the 1910s, as Gofman noted, flowers became a true passion for the artist. He ordered flower specimens from Holland. His students recalled that Golovin's flower garden at his dacha in Volosovo was an extraordinarily colorful spectacle. He wrote: "I have a special love for flowers, and I depict them with botanical precision". He often included items from porcelain sets in his still lifes. Eleonora Paston wrote: "Their cold whiteness was for him a reference point in the complex score of white shades, to which he always paid close attention".

Golovin's still lifes are distinguished by their decorative elements, typically composed of porcelain dishes, flowers, and brightly patterned fabrics. Gofman believed that the main protagonist of the artist's still lifes was the flowers: for him, as for other Russian symbolists, they represented not the force of life but a sign and mystery of perfection. According to her, they became a source of inspiration for Golovin and a school of color. She noted that Golovin long struggled to achieve the desired result — to imbue the work with the high harmony and beauty he discovered in flowers, these "marvelous creations of nature". His portraits conveyed tension and inner coldness. The world surrounding the human figure remained alien, marked by anxiety and distrust. In the painting Woman in a Hat (mid-1910s), Gofman saw the artist's arbitrariness in placing an unrelated bouquet of red roses next to a woman in a stiff hat pulled over her eyes.

Description of the painting

In the foreground, the painting depicts a girl timidly perched on the edge of an expensive Empire style chair. The artist portrayed Frosya, the five-year-old daughter of a janitor in the house where he lived at the time. She looks out of place amidst the luxurious interior setting. The table is laden with antique vases, exquisite dishes, and flowers. The artist presents two worlds: one, the still life, is a realm of dreams about a happy and luxurious world; the girl's sad eyes bring the viewer back to the second world—reality with its sorrows and contradictions. Contemporary Russian art historian Vladimir Kruglov called the painting one of Golovin's most poetic works of the time.

The painting in the Tretyakov Gallery collection

The canvas measures 146 by 97.2 centimetres (57.5 in × 38.3 in) (according to other sources, 141.6 by 97.8 centimetres (55.7 in × 38.5 in). It is executed in tempera on canvas. The lower left corner bears the inscription "A. Golovin". The painting is in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery, with the inventory number 9056. It was purchased from the artist by entrepreneur and collector I. A. Morozov for his Moscow collection. After the nationalization of the collection, it entered the State Museum of New Western Art, and later, in 1927, the State Porcelain Museum, from where it was transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery.

The painting was exhibited at the 14th exhibition of the Union of Russian Artists, held in 1916–1917 in Moscow (No. 397 in the exhibition catalogue), at Alexander Golovin's solo exhibition in 1963 in Moscow, and at the exhibition Alexander Golovin: Fantasies of the Silver Age. On the 150th Anniversary of His Birth at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2014.

Critics

Soviet art historians on the painting

Soviet art historian Valentina Antonova emphasized the realism of Golovin's painting, contrasting it with the works of Russian symbolists, fauvists, and cubists:

The lively charm of the child’s movement, warily observing the painter creating the portrait, is particularly striking amidst the transient beauty of objects. The starched tablecloth’s folds bristle, the ornate porcelain gleams colorfully, its glossy plastic surface competing with the tender flesh of wilting roses, the fragility of begonias, and the lush greenery of branches spread against the soft patterned fabric. The pages of a small book left on the seat rustle, the girl’s feet in shiny shoes rest comfortably on a striped rug, completing the splendid “essence of the world as it is” in this painting, so distinct from the artistic quests of "Blue Rose" and "Jack of Diamonds", which seek the “essence as it should be”.

Soviet painter, graphic artist, posterist, and writer Nina Vatolina in her book A Stroll Through the Tretyakov Gallery described her impressions of meeting a girl sitting at a table in the Tretyakov Gallery's cafeteria, strikingly reminiscent of the heroine of Golovin's painting:

She sat exactly like Frosya in Golovin’s painting Girl and Porcelain (Frosya), turning toward you from the stiff folds of the starched tablecloth, from the lush beauty of the flowers and porcelain on the table. The resemblance began and ended with the child’s movement, the curiosity of her slightly furrowed childlike eyes; it was both fleeting and persistent.

After this unexpected encounter, Vatolina confessed to feeling a strong connection to Golovin's portrait and even a "sense of involvement in its creation".

Ida M. Gofman considered Girl with Porcelain a work characteristic of Russian painting of the 1910s. She placed it alongside the paintings At Breakfast by Zinaida Serebriakova (1914) and Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya by Nikolai Fechin (1914). She identified common elements in these three paintings: decorativeness and a subject matter involving children and a colorful still life on a table. However, each artist, in her view, approached this subject differently. Serebriakova depicted a lively scene with children during breakfast. In At Breakfast, the still life lends immediacy and specificity to the depiction. The objects on the canvas exist for the children (in their hands, used for eating). Gofman noted that their interaction reveals the children's personalities and age-specific traits. In Fechin's work, the situation is more contrived: the girl sits on the table amidst a picturesque disorder of unwashed dishes and scattered fruits. She is the main focus of the artist's attention. The objects, flowers, books, and pictures on the walls — all these bright patches are arranged around her figure in a light dress, creating a unique atmosphere of a child's world. However, according to Gofman, Varya's face in Fechin's painting lacks carefree happiness; it is serious and anxious in an unchildlike way. In Gofman's view, this image is much closer to Golovin's Frosya than the bright images of Serebriakova's children are.

Russian art historians on the painting

Art historians at the Tretyakov Gallery, who included an annotation for Girl with Porcelain on the museum's website, agree with S. A. Onufrieva and Ida M. Gofman on the theatrical nature of the depiction. In their view, the canvas is characterized by a play with objects. Even works painted by Alexander Golovin from life resemble theatrical sets. By transforming reality into a theater stage, Golovin dramatizes flowers and porcelain. In the painting, he transforms objects: for example, he likens a living rose to one painted on a porcelain vase. The sugar bowl and teapot are depicted one behind the other, creating an illusion of mirror reflection, while the vases on the table are perceived by the viewer as reflections of one another. Tretyakov Gallery art historians believe that the girl's name in the title indicates the portrait-like nature of the depiction. However, they assert that the girl is "as much a decorative element of the work as the lush bouquets". The painting's composition contains an element of randomness, though the balance of all its elements suggests a meticulously planned composition.

In a book dedicated to Golovin's work, Soviet and Russian art historian A. P. Gusarova noted that the portrait Girl with Porcelain arose "from the artist's desire to combine the green patch of the couch and the red dress of the child". These colors, applied in large, vibrant patches, coexist with the delicate watercolor patterns of antique porcelain depicted on the table. Art historian Efim Vodonos noted a plastic rigidity in the depiction of material objects in the still life of Girl with Porcelain, contrasting it with the earlier still life Roses and Porcelain (dated 1912–1915), where such rigidity is absent.

Girl with Porcelain in education and upbringing

In 2010 the Culture television channel produced an overview of the history and artistic features of Alexander Golovin's painting as part of the children's program series To the Museum Without a Leash (13 minutes, Kvadrat Film studio, directed by Alexander Krivonos). In the dramatized storyline, a lonely Saint Petersburg professor (played by Russian actor and Golden Mask Award laureate Alexander Ronis) discusses the painting with his only listener, an English Cocker Spaniel.

The textbook Art. Visual Arts for 7th-grade general education schools, published in 2014 by Drofa and approved by the Ministry of Education and Science (later reprinted multiple times), uses a fragment of Golovin's painting to illustrate how artists depict facial expression and the gaze of a character.