The Demon Seated
Mikhail Vrubel (1856 to 1910) · 1890
A young giant sits hunched with his arms clasped around his knees, staring past you into the distance. His body seems too large for the canvas, pressed against the top and sides, and around him strange flowers bloom in crystal facets of violet, lilac and gold. Behind him a sunset burns. This is Vrubel's Demon, not a devil but a suffering spirit, drawn from the poem by Mikhail Lermontov about a fallen angel who longs for love and reconciliation with the world and cannot find it.
The technique is unlike anything else in the gallery. Vrubel built the picture out of flat, angular strokes laid with a palette knife, so that the sky, the flowers and even the Demon's skin look like a mosaic or stained glass. Step back and the fragments fuse; step close and the surface becomes an abstract pattern of colour. The muscular body, the huge dark eyes and the clenched hands express a tension that the artist described as sadness rather than evil, a mighty being with nowhere to put its strength.
Vrubel painted the picture in Moscow in eighteen ninety, while working on illustrations for Lermontov's poem, and it was bought for the Tretyakov in the early twentieth century. He returned to the Demon obsessively, in The Demon Flying and finally in The Demon Downcast, which hangs nearby and which he kept repainting even after it was exhibited. Soon afterwards he was hospitalised with mental illness and went blind before his death in nineteen ten. The hall in which you stand was designed specifically to hold his large works, including the great decorative panel Princess of Dreams.
Did You Know? Vrubel kept repainting the face of his later Demon Downcast after it was already hanging in an exhibition, changing it almost daily.
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