Painting. Russian artists. Aleksey Savrasov (1830-1897)

Aleksey Kondrat'yevich Savrasov, an outstanding Russian painter, was born and died in Moscow. Savrasov entered the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow in 1844 where he studied up to 1854 and taught there from 1857 to 1882. He was among the fifteen founder-members of the Wanderers.

He showed his two works at the first exhibition of the group. Savrasov together with Ivan Shishkin, Mikhail Klodt and Fyodor Vassil'yev established a particular Russian school of landscape painting. By 1870 the Savrasov's style had developed from a Romantic and somewhat artificial manner, as seen in the Losiny Island in Sokol'niki, of 1869, into a simpler, more serene treatment of typical scenery. The Rooks Have Come, of 1869, shown at the first Wanderers exhibition, won instant acclaim for its impressionable rendering of the unpretentious beauty of the countryside around the river Volga at the arrival of the first signs of spring. Full of light sadness, this painting became one of the most popular landscapes in the Russian tradition. It is perceived as a king of icon of nature.

Savrasov's later philosophical scenes of lakes, rivers and country roads seen under the immence sky against the landscape expanse as in the Country Road, of 1873, had a great impact on a number of Russian landscape painters notably Konstantin Korovin and Isaac Levitan.
 

Literature: Book "Russian art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva