Friday

Museum of Vasily Vereshchagin.

The Museum of Vasily Vereshchagin in the city of Cherepovets, Russia, is located in the painter's family home and an adjacent building. A truly great painter who had a real interest in framing his work, with some quite distinct frame styles, some of which were made to his detailed designs. Sadly only 10 small oil sketches are on display in the museum, out of a lifetime's work of over 2000 paintings, with only a few in original frames. The artist was good friends with Pavel Tretyakov who purchased many of his paintings. Vereshchagin's home museum is modest but very interesting, and the attendants gave a lot of additional information about his life and work. Here are two paintings with original frames, the first frame is on a painting at Kyoto Temple, and features Japanese themed ornament of dragons, and what look like cherry blossoms, and other foliage. This frame really deserves to be restored. The second frame on a painting of Mount Elbrus, is a quite common Vereshchagin design, with elaborate scrolling carved ornament, sadly overpainted and also worthy of restoration.





A more European frame can be seen on this painting below of a peasant girl. I call this a French Second Empire fluted cove frame, although I understand from a leading American frame expert that in the US they call it a Greek revival frame. This frame looks to also be original:


This painting of a camel is lovely, although the frame does not look that original to me...