Goals of the demon

This early work on the Demon theme, dated around 1883, comes from before Vrubel had fully developed the visual language that would define his mature Demon paintings. He was in his mid-to-late twenties, studying under Pavel Chistyakov at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, and the Demon concept — drawn from Lermontov's Romantic poem — was already occupying his imagination. These early studies document the long gestation of the idea before it crystallized in the great 1890 'Sitting Demon' commissioned for the Mamontov edition of Lermontov. The Tretyakov Gallery's holdings of Vrubel's early Demon-related work allow scholars to trace the evolution of his central obsession across two decades, from these preliminary figurings through the three major canonical paintings. The early works are typically less resolved than the mature masterpieces but reveal the process by which Vrubel arrived at his most distinctive imagery.

This early Demon study shows Vrubel's academic training in the solid, carefully constructed figure drawing and controlled tonal modeling, before the fully developed fragmented brushwork of his mature Symbolist style emerged.