Description of the painting "Golden Autumn" Ostroukhov Ilya Semenovich

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

Trace in the history of art can be left in different ways. Someone creates unfading masterpieces, and someone carefully collects and collects them in order to pass them on to posterity. In the genius of Ilya Ostroukhov, these two abilities happily combined. He collected paintings and samples of ancient Russian painting, which he himself restored. Creativity was another passion of the outstanding collector. In the constellation of Russian artists of the 19th century, Ilya Semenovich Ostroukhov rightfully occupies his place. "Golden Autumn" - a famous landscape created in 1887, straight from the traveling exhibition, where the stars of the first magnitude demonstrated their paintings, ended up in the Tretyakov Gallery.

Description of the painting "Golden Autumn"

Ostroukhova was not attracted by the traditional way of painting: he began his experiments not with painstakingly drawing plaster busts and watercolor sketches, but immediately made oil copies of landscapes by his favorite masters - Kamenev and Polenov. Then the master began to paint his own landscapes in the open air and impressed his contemporaries with the refinement and lightness of color. If you start the description of the picture“Golden Autumn” by Ostroukhov with a remark that it is all permeated with air and light, then you will have to finish with the words that a whole gamut of feelings lurks in it - from admiration to anxiety.

Here the artist abandons his habitual manner of building a landscape on subtle transitions of soft tones. The beauty of the autumn forest struck him with the rich color of the leaves and branches.

Composition solution of the picture

Ostroukhov builds the composition in three planes: slender maple trunks, translucent through the fireworks of leaves, where there are all shades of yellow-gold, in the foreground. The artist conveys in detail the expressive beauty of carved maple leaves, covering the ground with a sparkling carpet. Then the master deepens the space, showing in the middle plan of the composition a path that is lost in the forest. And here the description of the painting “Golden Autumn” by Ostroukhov concerns an unusual phenomenon for the landscape - the plot! And how else to call the lively dialogue of two magpies pacing along an empty path? White-sided birds, pecking at the seeds that have fallen on the path, busily looking for beetles crawling under the grass and twigs, turn the picture into a story about the continuous cycle of life. The earth no longer absorbs the bliss of the sun, but its warmth lingers in lemon-yellow and pink leaves, which slowly fall and mix with the brown grass. The sharp color contrast is weakened in the depth of the image, in the third plan of the picture. Only the clear blue of the sky, sharply peering through the crowns of trees, reminds of him. Bizarre curves of black trunksin the distance compositionally close the picturesque space.

The mood of the canvas

Wonderful and solemn time - autumn bursting with colors. Why does the picture “Golden Autumn” by Ostroukhov contain so much mystery and hidden anxiety? Is it because this season is changeable, impermanent? Only yesterday the most delicate azure of the sky and the golden brilliance of the trees caressed the eye, but today the faded grass has already caught hold of crisp hoarfrost, and thin trunks have been defenselessly exposed … Concluding the description of Ostroukhov’s painting “Golden Autumn”, it should be noted that the work combines the immediate freshness of the study, capturing mood, and a philosophically meaningful image of nature.

The artist has addressed the theme of autumn more than once, and these canvases have always concealed a special elegance, freshness and depth.