Eya Fechin
[4] Fechin created pictorial portraits, pencil drawings, and carved images of his daughter from her birth to her twentieth birthday.
Her mother, Alexandra Nikolayevna Fechin (née Belkovich), one of the daughters of the first director of the Kazan Art School, was eleven years younger than her husband.
Natalia Krotova, who posed for her father, wrote in her memoirs about visiting the Fechins: "There I met his daughter Eya, who was also out for a walk.
[22] In the 1940s, Fechin earned a degree as a modern dance therapist and founded an art therapy department at the Iowa State Mental Hospital.
He regretted that his imagination was not free enough because he had studied for too long...” She also noted that her father admired the work of Pablo Picasso and Carlos Mérida, one of whose sketches he had acquired.
She made significant efforts to popularize his art, including writing the foreword to a 1975 book about his work by artist Mary Balcom,[32][7] and creating her father's archive.
[27] With her help, an exhibition of his paintings from collections in the USSR and the United States was held in Kazan, Leningrad, Santa Fe, and New York in 1976.
According to Tuluzakova, in his children's portraits, Fechin expressed his belief in an a priori harmony of human nature and approached his subjects with genuine seriousness rather than sentimentality.
[38][39]The gallerist and collector Ildar Galeyev noted that the father's love and tenderness created images of his daughter “full of amazing harmony”.
[42] Dean Porter wrote that Fechin's early portraits depict Eya as a baby, symbolizing innocence, then as a girl just beginning to learn about the world, later as an “all-knowing teenager”, and finally as a “sophisticated young woman”.
[47][48] Art historian Pyotr Dulsky, in the first monograph on Fechin's work (published in Kazan in 1921), mentions several pictures of his daughter that the artist made in 1919 alone.
[58] Art historian and artist Sergei Voronkov calls this work of Fechin's distinguished by the special beauty of color and painterly skill.
[4] Voronkov noted that in portrait of Eya made in 1919:[59] The seeming simplicity, carelessness, almost ‘dabbing’ with paints, at a distance turns into a surprisingly beautiful and expressive childlike image of an inquisitive, intelligent girl.
The volume of the face is molded by a subtle play of light, shadow, and reflexes from the white collar, blue blouse, and brown hair.In the collection of the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan, there is also the miniature Portrait of a Daughter (1920–1922, cardboard, oil, diameter 7.5 cm, with the artist's signature "Fechin" at the bottom, inventory number Zh-1434).
[69] From the same period comes the wooden sculpture Eya (between 1927 and 1933, collection of I. Fechin-Brenham, USA; bronze casts are in the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan).
The face of the sculpture is detailed and polished, appearing fragile against the background of a mop of hair cut out by sharp movements of the chisel.
She is set against a different color scheme, formed by the grayish-white background, tablecloth, dress, golden hair, and delicate skin of Eya.
The canvas Mother & Child (1923) was dated by art historian Sofia Kaplanova to the years 1915–1916,[78] based on the apparent age of the girl in the portrait.
According to Kaplanova, Fechin depicted “the hidden tenderness in the child's serious, inquisitive gaze, and the depth of maternal love”.
The Soviet art historian praised the lyricism and masterful pictorial execution, calling the painting one of the best solutions to the theme of motherhood in Fechin's work.
Summer[Notes 2] (also known by the title Portrait of Mrs. Alexandra Fechin with Her daughter Eya,[43] 1924, canvas, oil, 125 × 125 cm, National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, Oklahoma City, USA)[72][43] depicts a breakfast scene in a sun-drenched meadow.
[13] Tuluzakova wrote that in the casual scene of breakfast in a sunny glade, Nikolai Fechin expressed his admiration for the world and humanity.
Tuluzakova noted the "decorative Impressionism" in the canvas, as well as the depiction of sunlight, which became “one of the main characters” and “the carrier of emotional content", Fechin managed to convey its shimmering, vibrating quality of space.
In contrast to the space that dissolves in a stream of light, the painting of faces and hands is dense, with highlights emphasizing the materiality of the form.
Tuluzakova emphasized the balance of static and dynamic, calculated and spontaneous, pictorial and decorative elements, as well as the mood of peace, warmth, and soft intonation indicative of family happiness.
[68][84] According to Dean Porter, in Eya in Peasant Blouse (1933) (where Nikolai Fechin deliberately chose an abstract background), one can sense the joy felt by the father painting “a young woman with sparkles in her eyes and a smile on her lips”.
Dmitry Seryakov noted that Fechin emphasized the almond-shaped cut of the daughter's eyes, her slightly protruding chin, and clearly defined lips.
Seryakov emphasized that the painting gives the impression of having been created in one short session, although, according to Fechin's own recollections, it required many hours of hard work.
The portrait Eya (also known as ia, mid-1930s) depicts a young woman with delicate facial features, which were carefully painted by Fechin.
Fechin explained this decision with two different reasons: in her words, “You are not as pretty as you used to be anymore”[90] and “You have already lost your childishness, but haven't found your personality yet; your appearance does not yet show character”.
