THE WORLD OF VASTSELIINA ESTATE IN 1913

Abstract

The main subject of this article is a photo album created by ReinholdKarl von Liphardt Jr, an outstanding representative of the BalticGerman landed gentry in Estonia in the first half of the 20th century.In the early 1990s, the director of the “Bildarchiv Foto Marburg” ofthe Art History Institute of the Phillips University Marburg, Mrs.Brigitte Walbe made the duplicates of the photographic materialsfrom the collection of the Baltic German historian and genealogistGeorg von Krusenstjern available to the author of this article.The article classifies and analyses the 181 photographs pastedin the photo album which, with the highest degree of certainty,can be attributed to Reinhold Karl von Liphardt Jr. (1864–1940), theowner of Raadi, Vastseliina and several other estates. Judging by the photographs in the album, it can be concluded that von Liphardt usedphotography as a means of enriching his emotionally saturated lifewith yet another means of artistic self-expression. The photographstaken in the period from the winter of 1912–1913 to the winter of1913–1914, convey an inordinate amount of visual information aboutthe landscape, architecture and society in the Vastseliina manor.Reinhold Karl von Liphardt’s photo album presents a series ofchronologically consecutive images and it is similar to a poetic “diaryin pictures”. Reinhold Karl von Liphardt used photography as aperfect means of documenting his ecocultural environment. Hislandscape photographs are characterized by great attention to detail.The cultural and sociological significance of the rural scenes in thephotographs is further increased by the presence of local people inthem. The Seto ethnic group lived in the estates of Reinhold Karlvon Liphardt and, thanks to their ethnographic uniqueness, drewthe attention of an educated landlord.The photos with individual and group portraits of therepresentatives of the Seto ethnic group are not only vivid evidenceof the Estonian culture in the first decades of the 20th century, butalso striking works of art, whose power of expression elevates themconsiderably above the emotionality and artistic effect of ReinholdKarl von Liphardt’s lyrical landscapes and idyllic family portraits.