FEDOTOV, fi'd&-tor, Paul Andreievich, a Russian painter who was born at Moscow in 1815 and died in 1852, is with good reason looked upon as practically the founder of the Russian "purpose painting° school; but to the circumstances of his life, rather than to any vigorous creative impulse of his nature, he owed that distinction. In Russian School of Painting' (New York 1916), A. Benois writes: "The son of a retired officer, Fedotov grew up in the half-provincial Moscow, in a typical middle-class family. Here he became familiar with the every-day life of the residents. Later on, in the military school and in the so ciety of his comrades, he acquired a familiarity with military circles. Finally, when he came in contact with the artistic world, it was too late to go to an [art] school: he was already a fully found man with well-shaped ideas and a manner of his own of perceiving and render ing things.° At that time, "despite the ruthless tyranny of Nicholas's government, the air was astir with [intellectual, artistic, spiritual] revolt. The necessity was felt of being renewed, re generated.° These moods — the "tendency," it was called — first found expression in literature of great power: they were also seeking expres sion in painting, but no echo could be expected from the bureaucratic and half-courtly world represented by and in the Imperial Academy of Art. "Fedotov alone was nearly fit for such a task, but even he, a retired officer, pensioned by the Emperor, a modest, simple man, intelli gent but childishly naive, could hardly come up to the level of the literature. He limited him self to what Gogol did (in Souls,' (The Revisers,' etc.), 15 years earlier, that is, to a keen but not very caustic satire of the foibles and follies of his compatriots.° And this turned out to be the most effective form of attack. He made his first appearance before the public with such paintings as (The Fop' satirizing bureaucratic ambitions, and that gay satire on the life of the merchant class, Major's Courtship.' Following these came a series of pictures in which he ridiculed the first phase of the feministic movement, the petty gentry, etc.—all of this series being conceived in a light vein, their intention being purely satirical, not didactic. "A field apart is occu
pied by his last works, in which he seems to turn to a quieter, more poetic, and more ar tistic way of looking at things. Such are his 'Widow' and the 'Officer at the Village,' ex traordinary in its poignant sadness.° In the midst of such activity he became insane, and thus was lost to art before his early death. But he had demonstrated brilliantly that for the correction of abuses slight weapons could be employed. When they fell from his hands, his successors at first employed the same, but bru tally afterward caught up bludgeons. We see, therefore, that Fedotov, a poor army officer with an ardent enthusiasm — but no training— for art, exerted such influence in an untried field because he realized that commentators upon the vices and follies of society, especially official Russian society, could express themselves under the cloak of apparently superficial wit that the jester's cap and bells must be, for art as well as for literature, the disguise in which they could escape the vigilant censorship enforced under Nicholas I. While Benois regards him as a "brilliant painter° and asserts that "some of the still-life
his pictures is worthy of the old Dutchmen,?' another recent critic says that "the titles of Fedotov's pictures and sketches speak for themselves,° and mentions
FEE,John G., American abolitionist: b. Bracken County, Ky., 9 Sept. 1816; d. Berea, Ky., 12 Jan. 1901. He entered the Lane Theo logical Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1842, and soon afterward began to preach against slavery. As a result he was mobbed several times, but in 1853 went to Berea, Ky., where he succeeded in founding a church and establishing Berea College (q.v.), an institution open alike to blacks and whites.