Beautifiers of Russian Palestine: Vasily Paskhin

Abstract

Russian religious art of the 19th century in the Soviet years did not correspond to the official ideological direction, in connection with which many of these works were destroyed, and the names of their authors were forgotten. In this sense, those works of Russian artists that have been preserved in the churches and metochions of the Holy Land allow us to restore these names and fill the lacunae of domestic art. The paper represents an attempt to establish the facts of the creative biography of one of these artists — Vasily Filippovich Paskhin, whose icon-painting works were preserved at the Alexander Podvorie (Metochion) in Jerusalem. The author refers to the surviving documents of the Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society (IOPS), to documentary descriptions of the lost church monuments of St. Petersburg, to the materials of restoration work carried out in 2006 at the Alexander Podvorie, and also analyzes the surviving works of Paskhin. Basing on the studies conducted, the author made a number of assumptions regarding the biography of the artist, the issue of his possible belonging to the famous St. Petersburg Peshekhonovs Icon Painting workshop, as well as the circumstances of ordering icons for the Alexander Podvorie and the participation of Archpriest Vasily Yakovlevich Mikhailovsky, an active member of the IOPS. Since the name of Paskhin is not found in the lists of the Academy of Arts, or in other lists of Russian professional artists, or in materials devoted to the study of the work of the Peshekhonovs workshop, the author suggests that Vasily Filippovich was a unique native talent that independently comprehended the heights of icon painting skill.