(b Kursk, 4 Oct 1838; d Kursk, 10 April 1869). Russian painter. The son of a general, he studied history and philology at St Petersburg University and at the same time studied (1859-63) at the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, under the battle painter Bogdan Villeval'de (1818-1903). Like many of his fellow students at the beginning of the 1860s, Shvarts was attracted to genre sketching from life, and he left many witty drawings with satirical social subtext (e.g. An Unequal Marriage; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.). However, his real passion remained history. The image of Ivan the Terrible that Shvarts created in the sketch Ivan the Terrible by the Body of the Son he Had Killed in the Aleksandrov Sloboda (1861; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.) and the oil painting based on this (1864; Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.) for a long time determined the style and nature of his portrayal in Russian art. At the same time as comprehending the dramatic quality of history, Shvarts aimed to achieve maximum historical and social accuracy in his history paintings, which was innovative in Russian history painting and brought the artist great fame. He became an Academician in 1865 with the painting Palm Sunday in Moscow in the Time of Tsar Alexei Mikhaylovich: The Procession of the Patriarch on a Young Ass (St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.). His work was still, however, academic in style, but he sought out new techniques during his travels to Germany (?1861) and, in particular, France (1863-4, 1867-8), turning sometimes to the art of Ernest Meissonier and to the Barbizon school, and he began working en plein air in the forest of Fontainebleau.
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