Our regular Audio Stories column is replenished with a new story created especially for the birthday of Robert Romanovich Bach (1859-1933) - Russian sculptor, academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts (since 1891), who worked in the sphere of easel sculpture. You will have the possibility to acquaint with the details of the creative career of a hereditary artist, the irregular student at the Imperial Academy of Arts, the apprentice of Alexander von Bock and Nikolay Laveretsky, the prominent sculptor that collaborated with the Saint-Petersburg Woerffel bronze and lapidary art factory.

Having perfectly mastered the technique of modelling, Robert Bach was one of the first with his attempts to get away from the academic art dogmatic assertion in order to reflect the peculiar features and psychological status of the people that he portrayed. As a result, the images of art and culture representatives created by the sculptor, from Pushkin to Tchaikovsky, were widely replicated by Kasli plant of architectural and art casting. Considering it his duty to share knowledge and creative experience with novice sculptors, Robert Bach had been giving modelling classes at the Drawing School under the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of Arts for over 40 years. In between commissioned works and teaching, Bach worked with various materials, creating images of animals and birds in wax, clay and plaster in order to most accurately convey their plasticity and expression.

Both portraits and animalistic works of Robert Bach are presented in the museum Collection exposition section "Sculpture". For more details about the outstanding sculptor, see our regular “Audio Stories” column.