Portraitist and landscape painter Alexei Gavrilovich Venetsianov is among the masters of the domestic genre. In his piggy bank are true peasant portraits with some sentimentality. One of the most sentimental, but at the same time mysterious paintings of the artist is considered the work "On arable land. Spring." This masterpiece raises many questions. We offer you a description of Venetsianov’s painting “On arable land. Spring”. Perhaps after that you take a fresh look at the familiar canvas, see effects and elements in it.
Venetsianov "On arable land. Spring": the year of creation and premises
Alexey Gavrilovich came from a merchant family. For a while he himself worked as a land surveyor in forestry. He studied the tricks of painting on his own, and then took lessons from the famous portrait painter Vladimir Borovikovsky. At 40, he ended his career as an official and moved from Petersburg to the Tver province. Since 1819, the artist and his family lived in the village of Safonkovo, Tver province. Here he began to develop his "peasant" style in painting.
Venetsianov was a very wealthy landowner and tried in every way to facilitate the life of the peasants. For them, he built a school, made it possible to keep horses and cattle. Just in the 20s of the 19th century the painting "On arable land. Spring" by Alexei Gavrilovich Venetsianov was painted. Together with her came out a whole cycle of paintings by the artist related to the labor of peasants. In the article you will see a photo of the paintings: "On the harvest. Summer", "Haymaking", "Threshing floor". All these masterpieces are today in the Tretyakov Gallery, and one of the villages in the Tver region was renamed Venetsianovo. The famous artist is buried there.
Description of the painting Venetsianova "On arable land. Spring"
It is impossible to imagine Russian painting without a masterpiece of Venetsianov. In the background of the picture, a plowed field is seen in spring. The grass turns green, because the artist left the edges intact. On the right we see thin trees and a strange sloping stump.
In the foreground of the canvas we see a very elegant young peasant woman. She is wearing a pink sundress and a beautiful kokoshnik. A woman walks lightly and smoothly along two horses pulling a harrow. The peasant woman steps easily with her bare feet, as if dancing and smiling slightly.
Right in the foreground we see a baby. He calmly plays with his toys. Everything depicted on the canvas is very beautiful: landscape, woman, horses. As well as an outfit of a peasant woman, blue sky and clouds.
The value of ethnography in the picture
We imagine peasant labor hard and exhausting. And in the picture of Venetsianov, a woman in a festive outfit easily copes with harnessed horses. Why is a woman doing “black labor” going in festive attire. Where is the real truth of life? The fact is that among the peasants the first plowing was equated with a holiday. Even in the days of pagan beliefs, in order to appease the gods of fertility, festivities were arranged in the villages.
Venetsianov in this picture is not so much immersed in ethnography and peasant life, as he captured the manifestation of eternal life. In the image of a peasant woman, which is much higher than horses, the artist showed a beautiful, light, young spring, stepping on the ground, renewing nature, calming children.
Proportions in the picture of Venetsianov
In the picture "On arable land. Spring", Alexei Gavrilovich Venetsianov was the first among Russian artists to show the work of a farmer in the form of a sacrament, something sacred. The large size of the woman in the picture suggests that she carries the allegorical meaning of spring itself. The image of the stately and powerful body of a peasant woman resembles the art of high antiquity. If you look closely at the canvas, then the horses resemble winged Pegasus.
If you look at the photo of the picture, it seems that this canvas should be large. In fact, the picture is not so big and does not particularly stand out in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery. Compared with its powerful and large-scale promise, its dimensions are very small - 51 by 65 cm.
Visual effects
Looking at the picture, we can notice very interesting visual effects. Firstly, Alexei Gavrilovich specially lowered the horizon line. This technique is used by icon painters, but Venetsianov applied it to secular painting. The use of the low horizon gives monumentality and solemnity to the main character of the picture.
Another trick of the artist is that in the background he portrayed another peasant woman, that is, he used the “mirroring” method. Visually it seems that this is not another woman, but the same one made a circle and moves away from us far into the future, like spring. Perhaps the artist used this technique to emphasize the cyclical, happening in nature.
Connection with the "Seasons"
The picture "On arable land. Spring" can be attributed to the whole cycle of paintings by Venetsianov, "The Seasons". In four of his paintings, Alexei Gavrilovich depicted different seasons, from early spring to late autumn and even winter. The autumn painting "Haymaking" was hidden for a very long time from the public, and the winter season was depicted on the canvas "Landscape", which disappeared without a trace. Thus, the artist perceives the peasant labor as something primordial, eternal, repetitive, similar to the changing seasons.
It is important to note that the original picture “On arable land. Spring” was called “Woman Harrowing the Field”. Then she was renamed the "Village Woman with Horses." Only after the creation of the cycle "Seasons" did it finally gain its present name. Today, looking at the master’s canvas, we are pleased to admire the harmony of Russian fields, the spring sky with rare clouds flying over the horizon. We are struck by the graceful movements of a peasant woman hovering above the ground, her beautiful dress in the form of a Greek tunic. Through a simple peasant scene, the master conveyed an ancient idyll.