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Ruseckas, Kanutas [Rusetsky, Kanut (Ivanovich)]
(b 1801; d 1860). Lithuanian painter. He studied law at Vilnius University (1816–21) and simultaneously took lessons in painting, engraving and sculpture with Jonas Rustemas, Juozapas Saundersas (1773–1845) and Kazimieras Jelski (1782–1867) respectively. In 1821–2 he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Guillaume Lethière. In 1822 he visited Rome, and he became an academician in 1830 with his copies of frescoes by Raphael. In 1831 he returned to Vilnius where he taught drawing and painting at the Gentry Institute. His commissions were mainly for portraits, but like many of his contemporaries he was interested in establishing an individual approach, as in two Self-portraits (1823 and 1830; both Vilnius, Lith. A. Mus.). In the 1840s he adopted the Italian academic style, idealizing the ‘pure’ life of the peasants, as in Women Reaping (1843; Vilnius, Lith. A. Mus.). He favoured light-heartedness and his subjects adopted guises from various historical periods, as in A Smiling Italian (1823) and Portrait of my Father (1845; both Vilnius, A. Mus.), in which he also employed techniques from 17th-century painting. In the 1850s Ruseckas worked mainly as a landscape painter in Belarus’ and contributed to Jonas Vilcinskis’s Vilnius Album (1848–60), painting Panorama of the City of Vilnius (1850; Vilnius, Lith. A. Mus.). His students included his son B. Ruseckas (1824–1913) and A. Romer (1823–97). Ruseckas’s artistic idealism mirrored his political ideas of freedom and he belonged to the Carbonari, allied to the Lithuanian Union of Patriots and the Russian Decembrists.
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