Masterpieces of Russian painting. Fedor Vasiliev

Thaw. 1871

Vasiliev F.A.
Canvas, oil
55.5 x 108.5

Russian Museum

annotation

This small painting is one of the most emotional works of the Russian landscape school. The monotonous panorama of the flat landscape, sparse vegetation, dilapidated village buildings create a painfully poignant mood of sadness and hopelessness. The travelers stopped on the road, which abruptly turns to the side, leaving them, as it were, at a crossroads. This state was consonant with the perception of the post-reform Russian reality by the artist's contemporaries. It is no coincidence that the picture (TG) received the first prize of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists and was repeated by order of Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich (RM).

Author biography

Vasiliev F.A.

Vasiliev Fedor Alexandrovich (1850, Gatchina -1873, Yalta)
Landscape painter, draftsman.
Honorary free member of the Imperial Academy of Arts (since 1873).
Born in Gatchina, St. Petersburg province. He studied at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists (1863-1867). Since 1868 - Member of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists. Under the leadership of I.I. Shishkina worked on about. Balaam. In 1871 he was enrolled as a freelance student of the Academy of Arts, but did not attend classes. I.N. Kramskoy.
In 1870, during a long journey along the Volga, he performed numerous drawings and sketches. Based on the materials of the trip, he created a number of significant works. He spent the end of his life in Yalta, where he wrote his best works. Despite the short period creative activity, rendered big influence on the development of the Russian realistic "mood landscape".

Fyodor Vasiliev's painting "The Thaw" was painted in 1871. But she received fame and universal recognition only decades after the death of the artist. She continues the main traditions of Russian painting.

In the foreground of the canvas is a country road. Despite the fact that the whole landscape is made in dark colors, the season is guessed - early spring. Birds gather in flocks and fly to the road in search of food that could remain under a layer of melting snow. In the center of the landscape, a girl testifies to an elderly peasant to go to a flock of shy birds. The boots of two travelers get stuck in the thawed road mud.

The background of the picture is represented by sections of trees, the bare branches of which are beginning to get rid of the snow cover. A lonely hut seems dilapidated and empty. But you can see that liquid smoke is spreading from its pipe, which means that life is glimmering in it. Withered grass timidly peeks out into the light from under the loose snow. Last year's branches begin to thaw, lying alone in the center of the canvas.

The sky appears special on the canvas. It is represented by shades from white to dark purple flowers. The rays of the sun still cannot break through the thick cover of gray clouds. But the time of spring has already come and it is felt not only by the melting snow. The whole canvas breathes the awakening of nature from a long sleep. The harsh winter is over, it has given way to a warmer season.

The painting "Thaw" allows the viewer to move to the day of a young spring, feel the retreat of the cold and enjoy beautiful scenery spring nature. It is especially sad and solemn on such days, the air is still fresh, but the frost no longer bites on the cheeks.

F. Vasiliev - Russian artist of the late 19th century. He made an integral contribution to the development of painting. The artist's canvases are not distinguished by the brightness of colors, but the nature depicted on them breathes and lives. Each of his canvases allows you to plunge into an exciting and beautiful world.

Description of the painting by Vasiliev Thaw

Fedor Aleksandrovich Vasiliev is a famous Russian artist who, like no one else, can show the beautiful in the ugly. Seems like they can't be combined. But this artist could. Such in its description is the painting "Thaw".

The picture of Fedor Alexandrovich looks dark, gloomy and dull. The viewer sees how the snow-white cover of the earth turns into mud and slush. And the clouds are rapidly covering the sky with a dense veil of dark blue colors.

But what beauty lies in this picture. After all, melted snow turned into mud, low-flying birds over the fields - everything speaks of the imminent arrival of spring. Winter gives way to spring, smoothly heading far, far towards the horizon. So the lines of Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev and Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet come to mind about the impending spring, to which all nature gives way.

Everyone has been waiting for spring: the trees standing in the background with the remains of frost, a dilapidated hut located on the right side and, of course, a little girl showing her grandfather somewhere far away. Maybe there, beyond the borders of the picture, streams flowed, making noise and ringing.

There is not a single bright shade in the picture, but you can feel the warmth emanating, it must be from a little girl, laughing and sincerely waiting for spring. The colors we see are mostly dark and bleak. Particular attention should be paid to the background, which lulls all nature. But one has only to raise one's eyes to the upper right corner, as one can see the very onset of heat with which the whole picture is saturated. How much he inspires hope in the environment.

And in the middle of the picture, the birds, no longer just flying in the sky, but descended to the ground, begin to look for food, as if feeling that bugs and worms are about to climb out of the ground.

It seems as if the artist who painted this picture conveys his dull mood or fatigue from such a gloomy season. But the name of this picture is not easy. "Thaw". In this word, the word "warmth" is hidden, which is about to overtake all the inhabitants of this village.

The painting by Fyodor Alexandrovich became famous very quickly and is known to this day. This is exactly how the great artist manages to depict the beautiful in the ugly.

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Fedor Vasiliev. Thaw.
1871. Oil on canvas. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
(author's copy: State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia).

In 1871, Vasilyev created one of his main works - The Thaw, which was presented in early spring 1871 at a competition in the Society for the Encouragement of Artists and won the first prize. This picture carried a great social content, it is all imbued with melancholy and sadness, inspired by the artist's bitter thoughts about the life of the Russian village.

Close in his outlook to romanticism, Vasiliev, striving to express strong feelings, was looking for bright, unusual states of nature, the complex life of the sky, tension before a thunderstorm, a thaw in the middle of winter.

The picture is executed in the artist's favorite warm golden-brown-olive tones and looks almost monochrome in color. Built on complex tonal relationships, it delighted contemporaries with the sophistication of the color scheme and the subtlety of writing. The horizontally elongated composition of the painting intensified the silence and homelessness of the flat landscape.

Vasiliev continues his discovery of Russian nature, trying to discern in it the most intimate, unique, which is peculiar only to her: the melodious softness of the lines,

The picture was a great, even huge success for a young artist. It was bought by P.M. Tretyakov. In a competition organized by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Thaw won first prize, while Savrasov's Pechora Monastery, whom Vasiliev might have considered one of his teachers, won second.

Vasiliev's painting of the same name, which adorns the exposition of the Russian Museum, is the author's repetition, executed especially for the royal court, and was commissioned by Emperor Alexander III. It was it that, among the forty best works of Russian artists, was sent to the World Exhibition in London in 1872, where it was noted as one of the most worthy, causing an enthusiastic article by an English reviewer.

The appearance of the painting "The Thaw" in the year of the opening of the first traveling exhibition, as it were, naturally introduced Vasiliev into the circle of advanced artists close to him.

Fyodor Vasiliev was twenty-three years old when a cruel and inexorable illness cut short his life. He could devote only a few years of inspired creative work to his beloved art, but even in this short period of time his brilliant and generous talent managed to reveal many of its sides and enrich Russian painting with a new and original vision of the landscape. home country. Kramskoy and Repin called Fyodor Vasiliev "a boy of genius", Stasov considered the young artist "tremendously talented", seeing in him "one of the best hopes of our national school".

Only the first steps were taken by Fyodor Vasilyev along the wide creative way and silent forever. But what he left us will forever sound in Russian art with its special poetic note. Vasiliev's artistic heritage is small, and it was not the abundance, not the variety of motives that delighted his contemporaries and captivates us to this day. Even Kramskoy very clearly defined the historical merit of his brilliant younger brother: "He was destined to bring into the Russian landscape what the latter lacked and still lacks: poetry with natural performance."

How monotonous, stingy and homeless is this deserted plain landscape of central Russia, well known to every Russian person, at that critical time when winter still argues with spring, but the humid breath of steadily approaching spring days is already clearly felt in the air!

Nature reluctantly wakes up from its winter sleep. There is no joy in this awakening. Rusty tones of melting snow turning into sticky mud, foggy distance and cloudy watery sky.

Everything around is wet and rotten - blackened melting snow, and lead-gray clouds, barely illuminated by the faint rays of the sunset sun, and a muddy road with a stale track of sleigh runners, and a shapeless stream that has spread in breadth, and black bushes that have thrown off the snow cover. And the piercing wind, also saturated with dampness and moisture, tirelessly ripples the water of the thawed stream and sweeps, sweeps fractional drops into the open endless distance. It must be very lonely, lost in this rotten mud, a passerby and the little girl accompanying him feel very lonely.

Standing hesitantly in front of a wide thawed stream in the middle of the road, they seem to be lost in the depressing extent of the dull expanse of Central Russian winter nature. Their figures further enhance the disturbing painful mood. But it does not exclude, and even sets off the peculiar beauty of the landscape. A timid ray of sunlight breaks through a dense layer of gray clouds, as if blessing travelers on a difficult path.

Not a soul around, only a rickety hut on the sidelines speaks of the proximity, albeit poor and wretched, but still a faithful haven for a homeless person, embraced at this late evening hour by a dank and chilly pre-spring thaw ...

"Thaw". 1871

In the spring of 1871, Vasiliev worked on The Thaw, although he was seriously ill: formidable signs of tuberculosis were discovered. The format of the picture, unusually elongated in breadth, in itself gave rise to the feeling of the length of the road along which the peasant and the little girl wander. The approaching spring brings no joy. Grey, damp and sad around. Just as sad as it was when they buried Father Fyodor. Oh, how many hearts have suffered on these roads! How many people's thoughts know these roads. And so my heart ached from this dear, miserable, sweet ... Vasiliev brought this feeling to epic strength.

1871 was a special year for Vasiliev. The first traveling exhibition has opened in St. Petersburg, and the most striking canvases are on it: “Rooks Have Arrived” by Savrasov, “The Thaw” by Vasiliev and “Pine Forest” by Shishkin.
The Thaw is so hot, strong, daring, with great poetic content and at the same time young and young, awakened to life, demanding the right of citizenship among others, and although resolutely new, but having roots somewhere far away... "Kramskoy expressed his impression. He still did not know anything about the upcoming Russian landscape genre of unprecedented flowering, but he foresaw it, guessed its regularity and inevitability.

At the end of winter, The Thaw was shown at the competition of the Encouragement Society and received the first prize. Tretyakov purchased the painting directly from the exhibition. At the same time, Vasiliev, in no more than a month, by order of the Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich (in the future Tsar Alexander III), completed a repetition of the painting, which is now in the Russian Museum. The repetition of the "Thaw" was not a simple copy of the author. It was like a further development of the motive. Vasiliev created two canvases of equal artistic merit. The committee, which produced a set of paintings for the World Exhibition of 1872 in London, settled on a repetition belonging to the royal family. It went to England.

This time the World Exhibition was of particular importance for Russian painting and sculpture. She literally revealed to Europe the high merits of Russian art. This happened due to the correct and objective selection of exhibits. Russia has shown that it has its own, unique face, creates works that are on a par with the best world achievements. Articles appeared in the London press in which the authors pointed to those remarkable features of Russian painting, which were lacking in the works of many European masters.

Reviews

And thank you very much for reading and for your kind feedback. Vasilyev was a genius, but unfortunately, he died at the age of 23... In the Russian Museum "Thaw", which belonged to the royal family, and in the Tretyakov Gallery is just that, the first picture. Most of Vasiliev's works are located there, Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov acquired everything that was written by Vasiliev.

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