page_title: Mikhail Vrubel
section_title: The Demon Downcast
hierarchical_section_title: Mikhail Vrubel / The Moscow period (1890–1902) / The Demon Downcast
caption_attribution_description: Demon Seated in a Garden
context_page_description: Mikhail Vrubel – a 19th–20th century Russian painter who worked in all genres of art, including painting, graphics, decorative sculpture, and theatrical art. In 1896, Vrubel married the famous singer Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel whom he regularly painted.
  Soviet historian Nina Dmitrieva compared Vrubel's artistic biography to a three-act drama with prologue and epilogue, while the transition between acts was rapid and unexpected. The "Prologue" refers to his earlier years of studying and choosing a career path. The "first act" peaked in the 1880s when Vrubel was studying at the Imperial Academy of Arts and then moved to Kiev to study Byzantine and Christian art. The "second act" corresponded to the so-called "Moscow period" that started in 1890 with the painting "The Demon Seated" and ended in 1902 with "The Demon Downcast" and the subsequent hospitalization of the artist. The "third act" lasted from 1903 to 1906 when Vrubel was suffering from his mental illness that gradually undermined his physical and intellectual capabilities. For the last four years of his life, already being blind, Vrubel lived only physically.
context_section_description: Ten years later, Vrubel returned to the theme of Demon which is evident from his correspondence with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov at the end of 1898. Starting from the next year, the painter was torn between the paintings "Flying Demon" and "The Demon Downcast". As a result, he chose the first variant, but the painting remained unfinished. The painting and several illustrations were inspired by intertwined plots of Lermontov's Demon and Pushkin's "The Prophet". 
   
  On September 1, 1901, Nadezhda gave birth to a son named Savva. The baby boy was born strong with well-developed muscles but had an orofacial cleft. Nadezhda's sister, Ekaterina Ge, suggested that Mikhail had "a particular taste hence he could find beauty in a certain irregularity. And this child, despite his lip, was so cute with his big blue eyes that his lip shocked people only in the first moment and then everyone would forget about it".
  While working on "Demon", the painter created the large watercolour portrait of a six-month child sitting in a baby carriage. As Nikolai Tarabukin later recalled:
  The scared and mournful face of this tiny creature flashed like a meteor in this world and was full of unusual expressiveness and some childish wisdom. His eyes, as if prophetically, captured the whole tragic fate of his fragility.
  The birth of Savva led to a dramatic change in the routine of the family. Nadezhda Vruble decided to take a break in her career and refused to hire a nanny. Hence, Mikhail Vrubel had to support his family. Starting from September–October 1901, Vrubel had experienced first depression symptoms due to drastically increased number of working hours. Starting from November, he stopped working on "The Demon Downcast". Vrubel's biographer later wrote:
  For the whole winter Vrubel worked very intensively. Despite usual 3–4 hours, he worked up to 14 hours, and sometimes even more, with a flash of artificial lightning, never leaving the room and barely coming off the painting. Once a day he put up a coat, opened window leaf and inhaled some cold air – and called it his "promenade". Fully engaged in work, he became intolerant to any disturbance, did not want to see any guests and barely talked to the family. The Demon was many times almost finished, but Vrubel re-painted it over and over again.
  As Dmitrieva noted: "This is not his best painting. It is unusually spectacular, and was, even more, striking upon its creation when the pink crown sparkled, the peacock feathers flickered and shimmered (after a few years, the dazzling colours began to darken, dry up and now almost blackened). This exaggerated decorative effect itself deprives the painting of actual depth. To amaze and shock, the artist, who had already lost his emotional balance, betrayed his “cult of a deep nature” – and The Demon Dawncast, from the purely formal side, more than any other paintings by Vrubel, was painted in the modern style".
  Vrubel's mental health continued to worsen. He started suffering from insomnia, from day to day, his anxiety increased, and the painter became unusually self-confident and verbose. On February 2, 1902, unsuccessful exposition of "The Demon Downcast" in Moscow (the painter hoped that the painting would be bought for the Tretyakov Gallery) coincided with a suicide of Alexander Rizzoni following incorrect criticism in the "Mir isskusstva".
  Then the painting was brought to Saint Petersburg where Vrubel continued to constantly re-paint it. However, according to his friends, he only damaged it. Due to the painter's anxiety, his friends brought him to a famous psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev who diagnosed Vrubel with an incurable, progressive paralysis or tertiary syphilis. Mikhail Vrubel travelled to Moscow without knowing the diagnosis where his condition only worsened. His painting was bought for 3 000 rubles by the famous collector Vladimir von Meck. Judging by the correspondence between Nadezhda Zabela and Rimsky-Korsakov, Vrubel got crazy, drank a lot, wasted money and quickly broke off for any reason. His wife and son tried to escape him and ran to relative
caption: Portrait of the painter's son, 1902. Stored at the Russian Museum
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2006:02:05 19:03:04", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6724", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "500", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "371"}