Skatpunktu maiņa. Rēveles periods (1906-1909) un tā atbalsis Vilhelma Purvīša dzīvē un glezniecībā
Change of Perspective. The Tallinn Period (1906-1909) and its Aftermath in the Life and Painting of Vilhelms Purvītis

Summary/Abstract: All biographies of the prominent Latvian landscape painter Vilhelms Purvītis (1872–1945) and almost every overview of early 20th century Latvian art briefly outline the period between two dates in his career – 1906 when he left Riga for Tallinn (old Latvian: Rēvele; German: Reval) to teach drawing in two secondary schools and 1909 when he returned to head the Riga City Art School. Nevertheless, Latvian authors in their representation of Purvītis’ Tallinn period have left unnoticed that this city was not only the object of his impressions painted alongside his teaching duties but also a cultural centre where Purvītis’ art was highly appreciated by critics and the public alike. This continuous ignorance has resulted in misinterpretations and unverified assumptions. Exploring the inner network of Baltic art life beyond the borders of present day national states, the author has attempted to fill in the existing gaps of knowledge. The sources of this study include originals and reproductions of Purvītis’ paintings of the Tallinn period, notices, reviews and advertisements in Baltic German, Latvian, Estonian and Russian periodicals from 1906–1909, catalogues of exhibitions and museums, documents in Estonian and Latvian archives as well as the memoir of Purvītis’ Tallinn pupil Alfred Rosenberg whose shameful role in the history of the Third Reich does not detract from the fact that some episodes of his Last Notes give illuminating evidence about the activities of the Latvian painter in the Estonian capital. The main intertwined questions in the article refer to Purvītis in the art scene of Tallinn and the representation of Tallinn in his painting while also tracing the aftermath of this period in his later life and work. The section “Departure from Riga” reconstructs the chain of events from 1904 to1906 associated with Purvītis’ decision to leave for Tallinn, then the capital of Estonia, the neighbouring Baltic province of the Russian Empire, where he accepted teaching positions in Peter’s Real School and the Cathedral School of the Estonian Knighthood. The author disputes the widespread opinion that this step was primarily caused by Purvītis’ split with the ethnic Latvian part of the local intellectual community during the 1905 revolution. Due attention should be paid to the fact that the most famous modern artist of the Baltic provinces agreed to work in unspecialised general schools exactly at the time when the City of Riga reorganised the former private Elise von Jung-Stilling drawing school into a municipal art school appointing landscape painter Gerhard von Rosen as its director. The teaching staff of the City Art School mainly represented a group of artists that had successfully united against the international Nordic Exhibition project for the opening of the Riga City Art Museum while Purvītis and Johann Walter strictly opposed their egalitarian and parochial attitude. As these colleagues later accepted Purvītis’ leadership, it obviously seemed appropriate to conceal and forget their former confrontation. The next section reveals how Purvītis established himself in the art life of Tallinn where he also offered private art classes, joined the Art Section of the Estonian Literary Society’s Museum Department and became its board member. In Tallinn, he was praised as “our compatriot of genius” and the “famous artist of the homeland” – the common pride of the Baltic. Already in 1900 the Estonian Province Museum owned one of his masterpieces, “Early Spring” (“Melting Snow”, c. 1897–1898, now in the Latvian National Museum of Art).A separate section recounts the routes and reception of Purvītis’ exhibitions of the Tallinn period, focusing on three major events – Riga (1907), Jelgava (1907–1908) and Tallinn (1908). That time was the only episode in Purvītis’ career when large groups of his paintings were subsequently exhibited in the centres of all three Baltic provinces Livonia, Estonia and Courland.The exhibition history leads to a discussion of Purvītis’ painterly quests during the Tallinn period and their aftermath. This part in his legacy is typified by urban motifs in close-ups of Old Town buildings and views of the bay with the city skyline on the horizon. He also painted wild Estonian seashore and landscapes without topographically identifiable landmarks. The new visual experience filled Purvītis’ works with a great concentration of those qualities that Russian art critic Yakov Tugendhold in 1916 attributed to Latvian art in general, describing it as “permeated with the air of the seaside”. Here this marine presence manifested itself in the selected imagery and imbued the optical structures of paintings that the reviews of the 1907–1908 exhibitions predominantly interpreted in terms of Impressionism. The impressionist approach found its most convincing expressions in close-up townscapes and fragmentary park scenes.Some of these paintings suggest deliberately varied seriality that is still more obvious in seascapes with the distant skyline of the Old Town. All these pictures share the same compositional structure where the artist has studied the fine relationships between strictly predefined elements. In the following years, his visual discoveries from depictions of the Tallinn seashore migrated to other landscape paintings, such as the famous “Winter” (c. 1910, Latvian National Museum of Art). In the 1920s and 30s, the vibrant visionarism of Tallinn views resonated and even increased in some pieces of Purvītis’ Small Town Series of paintings. This resonance, however, was preceded by study assignments of the Riga City Art School where the impressionistic branch of Purvītis’ Tallinn achievements was put into wide use since the autumn of 1909. The rather solitary top celebrity of the Baltic art scene returned to Riga as an ambitious organiser and administrator of art education on a municipal and later national scale. The combination of urban scenery and painterly experiments did not match the popular image of Purvītis as a painter of his homeland. This may explain the enduring reluctance to explore available sources about the urban and marine interlude in his life and art.

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