Two men in a fur coats

Aquatint after Jan Rustem.

Jan Rustem (1762–1835) taught in the Department of Drawing and Painting at Vilnius University for many years, and both in his classes and in his artistic practice, he devoted exceptional attention to drawing, which in the early 19th century was considered to be the basis of all art education. He stressed the importance of drawing from life, and valued the ability to capture a passer-by on the street with precision, by showing the characteristic features of one type of person or another. In contrast to the Neoclassicists, Rustem believed that a sketch for a painting was more than a preparatory study. His contemporaries valued his drawings as independent ‘small’ works of art, while former students from the Vilnius School of Art immortalised many of them in their prints. Rustem worked closely with his student Jan Gottlieb Kisling (1790–1846), who engraved an entire series of his teacher’s drawings. Kisling printed some of these engravings on birch bark, thus refuting the aesthetics of the blank white page that prevailed in Neoclassical art. Interestingly, several of Rustem’s students copied a composition of his showing two men huddled up in long fur coats on a frosty winter’s day. We can also see it in the lithographic series ‘Picturesque Memories of Small Works by Jan Rustem’, produced in 1837 by Kazimierz Bachmatowicz (but the figures are inverted).

Text author Rūta Janonienė

Source: Law firm Valiunas Ellex art album RES PUBLICA (2018). Compiler and author Rūta Janonienė
Expositions: “John Rustem. Artist and educator“, 30 October 2012 – 10 March 2013, Vilnius Picture Gallery, Vilnius

Aquatint after Jan Rustem.

Jan Rustem (1762–1835) taught in the Department of Drawing and Painting at Vilnius University for many years, and both in his classes and in his artistic practice, he devoted exceptional attention to drawing, which in the early 19th century was considered to be the basis of all art education. He stressed the importance of drawing from life, and valued the ability to capture a passer-by on the street with precision, by showing the characteristic features of one type of person or another. In contrast to the Neoclassicists, Rustem believed that a sketch for a painting was more than a preparatory study. His contemporaries valued his drawings as independent ‘small’ works of art, while former students from the Vilnius School of Art immortalised many of them in their prints. Rustem worked closely with his student Jan Gottlieb Kisling (1790–1846), who engraved an entire series of his teacher’s drawings. Kisling printed some of these engravings on birch bark, thus refuting the aesthetics of the blank white page that prevailed in Neoclassical art. Interestingly, several of Rustem’s students copied a composition of his showing two men huddled up in long fur coats on a frosty winter’s day. We can also see it in the lithographic series ‘Picturesque Memories of Small Works by Jan Rustem’, produced in 1837 by Kazimierz Bachmatowicz (but the figures are inverted).

Text author Rūta Janonienė

Source: Law firm Valiunas Ellex art album RES PUBLICA (2018). Compiler and author Rūta Janonienė
Expositions: “John Rustem. Artist and educator“, 30 October 2012 – 10 March 2013, Vilnius Picture Gallery, Vilnius