Alexey Savrasov - the founder of the realistic landscape in Russia

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

It's amazing how this clumsy powerful stern merchant's son - Alexei Savrasov - subtly felt and no less subtly reflected primordially Russian landscapes on his canvases. Here is a portrait of Alexei Kondratievich Savrasov by Vasily Perov.

The artist looks at us sternly, sullenly, distrustfully. As if asking: “What do you think of my work? After all, bright Italian nature is not depicted there, but only undressed trees in spring, the wide Volga, views of distant monasteries or the Kremlin. What do you see in them?”

Rural View, 1867

Already having students, while working as the head of the landscape class at the school, Alexei Savrasov painted the most ordinary village, located on the hilly banks of a narrow stream, the slopes of which are covered with soft grass-ant.

In the foreground is a beekeeper, beehives and cherry blossoms (not only the Japanese see the beauty of cherry blossoms), while the tree branches themselves are still bare. They haven't leafed out yet. The trunks and branches stretching towards the sky are gracefully and whimsically curved. It is ours - ordinary, dim, despite a sunny joyful day. Still pulling fromcoolness of the earth, and the air that filled the picture had already warmed up. A river, when you involuntarily follow its course, flows into a lake or into a larger river. On the horizon is a narrow light sandy spit. A gently green birch grove descends from a small slope to the river. Alexei Savrasov showed the discreet charm of the vast expanses, to which every Russian person is so accustomed.

"Moose Island in Sokolniki", 1869

From my native Moscow, I didn’t have to go anywhere in search of a dense forest. In the foreground, we have the usual clay puddles, through which the gati are thrown so that the owner can approach the herd of cows grazing on the edge of the pine forest.

Aleksey Savrasov looks lovingly at the green edge in the distance and the powerful wedge of the pine forest that crashes into it. And, as usual, we see the painter's favorite detail - the bare trunks of the mast forest, which is hidden near the horizon, merging with dark clouds swirling near the ground. The sky itself changes tone from light golden in the center to rich blue-gray. A native Muscovite, Aleksey Savrasov has been accustomed since childhood to see these discreet colors of the Moscow region. Perhaps even when he closed his eyes, they were in his mind's eye.

Undressed spring

It is she who is depicted on a small canvas by Alexei Savrasov "The Rooks Have Arrived" (1871). This image is so reliable that the look, as if you are on the street, runs across, not stopping from the snow with thawed patches and deep dirty puddles, in whichreflects the sky and willow bushes growing side by side, then up, to where clouds of the same shade as the snow below float in the blue expanse.

Earthly and heavenly unite together. And above everything stands the incessant din of rooks fighting over their old nests blackening with powerful heaps of branches on birch trees, and building new ones. The air smells of melted snow and spring. Bare white birches with thin branches are graphically traced against the sky. A white church with a bell tower in the distance and a field and a forest stretching towards the horizon. What a native landscape this is, which we observe everywhere and everywhere in the middle non-Chernozem Russia, this is its most generalized image. Aleksey Savrasov's paintings will more than once depict the face of the beginning of spring, but he will not create a second such masterpiece. And who else would write this?

Paintings by Alexei Kondratievich Savrasov

A. G. Venetsianov. But the theme of this singer of nature was more inclined to reflect the peasant life that he saw in his estate. Savrasov is gradually moving away from the original romantic traditions, where trees are painted with lush crowns, where there are huge boulders overgrown with low grass, and the whole tone of the picture is dark, and only a gentle blueness of the sky covered with clouds glimmers slightly - “View in the vicinity of Oranienbaum” (1854). He begins to carefully peer into each season, finding a special charm for himself in them. But most of all, trunks, branches, branches of trees attract his attention. Themwhimsical curves, when they reach for the sun, their interlacing. The artist is attracted by early spring. The Flood (1868) is a magnificent picture of awakening nature, which "greets the morning of the year through sleep."

Birches were almost flooded by the flood. And here they stand, reflected in the mirror of calm water so that it seems that we see not just their repetition, but their roots, like a crown, which cannot be seen otherwise. Later, Maurits Escher, who explored symmetry and infinity, would come to this technique. But the innovator in this area, who did not set such ingenious tasks, was undoubtedly A. K. Savrasov. The artist raised many students who scattered from under his wing. Their names and works have become significant milestones in Russian painting (K. Korovin, I. Levitan, M. Nesterov).