More Siege Paintings Should Have Fire
More Siege Paintings Should Have Fire
The work of January Suchodolski
No, not the time when the ghost of Peter the Great drove Russian expansion under his niece, Anna Ioannovna. The other time, when Catherine the Great resumed the Russian imperial project in the Black Sea. American naval captain John Paul Jones took part as a rear admiral in the Russian Navy to cover the landings. Yes, the time when the Ottoman empire lost control of the Crimea for good. That time.
That time, in 1788, Catherine’s lover Grigory Potemkin tried to starve the Turks out of their fortress at Özi, because it was less risky than storming the walls. He had a navy to supply him, and he had a point, but he was called a coward, and as the months passed into a cold December, his army was too restive to wait any longer. His nighttime assault took the defenders by surprise (see above). Casualties were indeed heavy but the palace fell and the defenders were butchered.
It was all good material for hymns and poems by pious Christian soldiers, so tons of it celebrated this bloody victory in Russian. January Suchodolski is somewhat surprising then. A Polish cadet who took part in the nationalist November Uprising of 1830, he later became battle scene painter to Tsar Nicholas I, painting The Siege of Ochakov in 1853. I rather like it because there is fire.
Fire ought to appear in more siege paintings than it does. Just about every siege in history has involved things on fire, but so many otherwise terrific siege scenes lack so much as a candle-flame, let alone a real inferno. Smoke is sometimes used to darken the background, and Suchodolski did that too sometimes, but here he has used it to brighten the scene up, even cheer it on.
The position is topped with gabions, essentially bundled sticks filled with dirt, and they look a bit like towers; one of them seems to be falling over. Janissaries and palace guards are backlit in the final moment of envelopment, outflanked by thoroughly Prussianized, westernized troops. A second column streams into the open gap made by the artillery bombardment, which probably caused the fire.
Suchodolski used fire in a few of his paintings. Another, Siege of Akhaltsikhe, depicts Russians storming a city in the Caucusus during yet another invasion of Turkey in 1828. Whereas the victory of his 1788 forced the Ottomans to let Russian merchant ships have free passage through the Bosphorus, after the defeat of this war, the Ottoman empire had to give Russian naval ships free passage through the Bosphorus. The new encroachment on sovereignty was a serious moral blow to an ailing empire, the “sick man of Europe.”
And that is what we see on fire in Suchodolski. I am not an art expert, nor an art historian, but I do note that he has only used fire in his paintings of the Turkish wars, whereas his battles of the Napoleonic wars have no flames in them at all. He uses fleecy white smoke to backlight his figures, or sky haze to focus attention, but not flames.
An obvious implication, especially given the level of antipathy between Russian and Turk, is that Suchodolski wanted to show the Turks going to hell. However, both of these paintings also depict nighttime operations, a uniquely difficult circumstance for any painter to capture, so let us grant him the benefit of the doubt and the artistic license to innovate.
