Dailės mecenatystė Lietuvoje XIX a. antroje pusėje - XX a. pradžioje
ENThe flourishing of art and the character of its development depend not only on the level of the country’s development, political conditions, but also on the customer’s needs, his financial possibilities and taste. At the beginning of the 19th century in Lithuania as in Western Europe the functions of an individual Maecenas were gradually undertaken by the collective institutions that had become the public Maecenas supporting various cultural initiatives. The most important public Maecenas of the first thirty-year period of the 19th century was Vilnius University. After its closure, the main supporters of culture were the patriotically-minded part of Lithuanian nobility which not only supported the poor creative intelligentsia, but started itself spontaneously to participate at the scientific and cultural life of the country. In 1855, the Vilnius Archaeology Commission, established by E. Tiškevičius, serves as one of the first samples of collective Maecenas manifestation in Lithuania. The tsarist cultural policy after the suppression of the 1863 uprising did not bring any good to the culture of Lithuania. On the contrary, it consciously and systematically destroyed the monuments of our architecture and art. In all possible ways the Russian culture was being rooted in Lithuania and was not only assisted by the subsidies from the State treasury, but also by the contributions of the repressed Lithuanian gentry. The donations in Russia added to it. But the policy of Russianization that lasted for several centuries did not justify the hopes of its executors, except the fact that the process of natural development of Lithuanian art was stopped. In 1866 the drawing school, established on the initiative of P. Kornilov, the patron of the education department, „for the purpose that local art... would acquire the Russian shape“, did not fulfil to the full the role it was destined.Due to its head I. P. Trutnev, who put forward the professional matters above the political ones, the Vilnius Drawing School that propagated the realistic portrayal method had not made a special effect on Lithuanian art. Its existence under conditions when there were no other institutions in Lithuania propagating art can be evaluated as a positive phenomenon. a positive phenomenon. In the eighth decade when the governor-general Potapov slackened the reins the artistic life in Lithuania began to gradually activate; in 1876 on the initiative of the Russian artists that then worked in Lithuania the Permanent Vilnius Art Works Exhibition Society was created. Several exhibitions, initiated by the Society, set out to motion from stagnation the artistic public of Vilnius; the more significant was the fact that official representatives not only did not extend any prohibitions against them, but also participated with their modest collections and were the main patrons of the Society activity. The political thaw in Lithuania raised hopes to the local intelligentsia of reviving the culture of their country. The local artistic life in Lithuania became active only at the last decade of the 19th century, when the older artists started coming back from exile and a new generation of painters which was educated abroad grew up. The more frequently organized art exhibitions revealed a certain provinciality of our artists which was conditioned by the political and cultural isolation that lasted for several decades as well as by the influence of academic and realistic Russian art. The search for innovative forms at the end of the 19th century in Lithuania was still alien to the artists. They had, by the way, to adapt themselves to the taste of mediocre people that was not very much developed in art. The artists’ material position was not easy either.The richer collectors in Lithuania most frequently had paintings and sculptures sent from abroad. Only an insignificant part of artists were given a more serious material support. The most conspicuous individual patrons of art at the end of the 19th century were the Przezdecki, the owners of the Rokiškis estate, the count Hilarijus Lenskis, Juozapas Montvila, the Vilnius banker and philanthropist. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries among the artists working in Lithuania the differentiation on national grounds started to be more prominent. Various art societies and circles began to be created. After the interest into the country’s past increased, ethnographic, numismatic, archaeological, historical and art works collections began to be accumulated, more and more attention was accorded to the decaying monuments of old architecture and art. The patrioticallyminded Lithuanian aristocracy and intelligentsia joined their activities by organizing scientific and cultural societies. On the basic of their collections and donated means the Museum of Science and Art was established in Vilnius, the initiator of which was V. Tiškevičius, as well as the Museum of the Science Fellows’ Society, which eventually joined together both collections. The official authorities of the country were totally indifferent to the promotion of local culture. Art exhibitions, organized by the efforts of individual initiators, the creation of art and scientific societies and museums, involving the aristocracy and intelligentsia of Lithuania, proved obviously that the most popular and almost the only (with some exceptions) form of Maecenas in Lithuania at the second half of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th centuries was the public patriotic patronage, supported by more or less substantial donations. [...].
