The media, which ought to reflect the synthetic nature of the noble culture of the late XVIII- early XIX centuries and which contained the results of home music composing and writing amateur poetry was the home album. One of the earliest surviving "Picture books" is an album of the views of Bogoroditsk garden, executed by A.T.Bolotov together with his son Pavel. Of course for A.T.Bolotov, who had been working on arranging a landscape garden in Bogoroditsk - the estate of Bobrinsky near Tula - for 20 years it was not an entertainment to "draw" such an album. He recorded the results of his work, often took the album with him wherever he went and demonstrated it in every possible way, just like an advertising poster. But in fact Bolotov was ahead of time: drawing in the albums as a special type of art only appeared in the second half of the XVIII century. The forthcoming period - the first half of the XIX century - was to become a golden age of the album drawing.
At the beginning while drawing in the album a nobleman didn't even aim to compete with the "Academic" masters and never set off his leisure works against professional art. His art-pieces were supposed for home use only. The age of Romanticism supplied the dilettante artistic experience with a firm ideological basis. In earlier days dilettantism was regarded as a lower level of professional art, whereas from the beginning of the XIX century dilettantism tended to distance from professionalism. A dilettante artist was thought to serve the "pure" art and his talent should never touch with daily routine such as money, otherwise it could be vulgarised.
In 1820-ies some changes could be noticed in the development of album graphics. P.L.Yakovlev wrote in his book "Zapiski moskvicha" ("Muscovite's Notes", 1828): "The owners of the modern albums tend to collect in them the drawings of the best artists and hand-written notes by the well-known writers. There are some albums, which in 50 years would cost fortune; they'd be more expensive than the whole Russian library. I should confess that in the past the albums were meant for the owners while nowadays they are mostly for show off. Earlier they were kept as a memory of the friends; now they are mostly for vanity"
