During his life, Vrubel immersed himself in the exploration of image of the Demon. It became the central theme of his work and in many respects determined the artist’s spiritual journey and his tragic fate. The image emerged from a complex fusion of poetic, and the musical and theatrical impressions. The theme was based on the poem “Demon” by M. Yu. Lermontov. An important role in the formation of the image was also played by the artist’s impressions of the opera of the same name by A. G. Rubinstein staged in the Kiev Theater.

The image of the Demon reinterpreted by the Symbolist artist expresses the innermost experiences of a person of the “Fin de siècle” era and their dreams of the divine and beautiful, but at the same time the tragic discord between the world and themselves, and the painful search for the meaning of existence. The longing for “the music of a whole person” became the inner nerve of “The Demon Seated”.

In 1890 Vrubel again turned to the embodiment of his concept and described the Demon in the following way: “... a half-naked, winged, young and sadly pensive figure is seated hugging his knees, against the background of the sunset, and is looking at a flowering meadow from which branches are stretched towards the figure as they bend with flowers”. This description corresponds to the 1890 watercolor sketch. The organic forms used in the sketch become fantastic shapes in the painting. The subject is transformed, and the landscape becomes less defined, and the Demon loses his wings. The artist created his own painterly and modelling system in order to symbolically express the dramatic complexity of the human spirit; he broke volumes into facets and “crystallized” them making the volumes translucent and saturated with light. The wide brush strokes and the use of a palette knife transformed flowers into giant druses of crystals to become similar to the interplay of colored cobalt glass in a mosaic. Their flickering resembles the twilight of a mysterious temple, but in this temple the spirit yearns and the flesh is powerless. The seated figure of the young titan, alike to a compressed spring, brings to mind the words uttered by Lermontov’s hero, “... the earthly world is small for me”.

Vrubel explained that his Demon is “not so much a spirit that is evil as one who is suffering and sorrowful, and yet is a powerful and ... majestic spirit”, and the artist fully agreed with Lermontov’s interpretation of his hero: “That was not a terrible spirit of hell, a vicious martyr, oh no! It looked like a clear evening: neither day, nor night, neither darkness, nor light!...”

“The Demon Seated” is one of the most and mysterious creations by the artist who was a visionary mystic. He plunged into the world of real forms to lovingly and inquisitively study their structure, and he transformed them into a vision of fantasy and adjusted them in his own elevated manner. The poet Alexander Blok spoke at the artist’s funeral in 1910 and called him a “messenger”, saying that “his message is that the gold of an ancient evening is interspersed in the blue-and-lilac night of the world. His Demon and Lermontov’s Demon are symbols of our times, neither day nor night, no darkness, no light”. 

Accession Number: Инв.5600

Credit Line: Received from the collection of V. O. Girshman. 1917