Alexei Kondratievich Savrasov

Collection of V.F.Mering, Kiev
Collection of V.I.Karzinkin, Moscow
Private collection, France

Moscow, Exhibition of the Moscow Society of Art Lovers, 1871

The Eleventh Report of the Committee of the Society of Art Lovers, Moscow: Gotie, 1872, mentioned on p.5
N.Novouspensky, A.K.Savrasov, Leningrad and Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1967, p.118 listed under works from 1871
F.Maltseva, A.K.Savrasov, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1977, p.111 illustrated b/w; p.298 listed under works from 1871
V.Petrov (ed.), Savrasov, Moscow: Bely gorod, 2000, p.18 illustrated b/w
L.Iovleva (ed.), A.K.Savrasov, Moscow: Skanrus, 2005, p.30 illustrated b/w; p.241, no.51 listed 

Structural Condition The canvas appears to be lined with an old lining canvas acting as a loose unattached dust canvas on the reverse. This is providing an even and stable structural support. Paint Surface The paint surface has a relatively uneven varnish layer. There are some very fine lines of craquelure most notably within the impastoed pale pigments of the sky and below the figures in the foreground. These appear stable and are not visually distracting. There are a few very small paint losses within the craquelure below the figures and a few further small losses in the lower right. These appear stable at present. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows scattered retouchings throughout the composition, the most significant of which are: 1) a vertical line with associated retouchings on the left side of the composition running from above the horizon to below the figures, 2) scattered retouchings throughout the sky including around the clouds , along the upper edge and just above the horizon on the right side of the composition, 3) small retouchings within the cliffs on the right side of the composition and a vertical line running from the cliffs through the water on the right side of the composition, and 4) other scattered retouchings within the foreground and above the lower edge. There are other areas of pale fluorescence within the composition which may be previous restoration. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in good and stable condition.
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The Volga Near Yurevets is a recently rediscovered masterpiece by Alexei Savrasov that is documented extensively in the literature on the artist. It is the most important work by the artist ever to be offered for sale at auction. It was the first large scale composition the artist made on the subject of the Volga river and marked the beginning of what was to become a celebrated series of Volga landscapes painted during the 1870s. This was Savrasov’s golden decade when he painted his best works, including the sublime The Rooks Have Returned (1871) which brought him fame.

In Savrasov’s biography, it was a period of both the ‘best and worst’ times.  He and his wife Sofia Karlovna and their two young daughters moved to Yaroslavl on the river Volga at the beginning of 1870. In initial letters to Pavel Tretyakov from Savrasov and his wife it seems their life there was happy and settled, enabling the artist to focus on his painting. Here, he started work on The Volga near Yurevets, inspired by a picturesque scene close to a small town to the east of Yaroslavl along the Volga.

Sadly, during this trip tragedy struck when a premature third child died days after a difficult birth. Plans quickly changed: in letters to Tretyakov, referring to his painting simply as The Volga, the artist decided not to send it to exhibition in St Petersburg in February 1871, but instead, once his wife’s health had improved, he travelled to Moscow a month later to enter it in the annual prize contest of the Moscow Society of Art Lovers. Paintings which were submitted to the Society were done so anonymously but marked with a symbol of some kind, such as the palette and brushes in the lower right corner of the present painting. His efforts to complete and show the work and carry on despite personal tragedy were rewarded as it earned the artist first prize in the landscape section, and it was to stay on permanent exhibition throughout the year.

The painting not only impressed the critics of the day but was also enthusiastically received by the public as noted in an account in the records of the Society, it 'aroused the public's interest for the novelty of the subject matter, and for its brilliant transmission'. In Sovremennaya Letopis' (a weekend supplement to the newspaper Moskovskie Vedemosti), a critic writes of it, 'In the landscape section, the first prize went to Alexei Savrasov for his Volga near Yurevets. The painting is quite big, the colour scheme - if it is possible to say this - is rainy. The endless swell of the great mother river Volga; a cloudy sky; Yurevets on the hill; a band of burlaki hauling a barge; not a happy but a characterful painting'.

Savrasov clearly dates the work 1870 on the anchor in the foreground. However, there is little doubt from his sketches and correspondence with Tretyakov that he was still completing the painting in January and February 1871, possibly adding finishing touches to the figures themselves. He made several studies which he took directly from nature, to build up the finished canvas in his studio. In a smaller oil, View of the Volga near Yurevets (fig.2, 70.5 by 96cm), painted on the same stretch of the Volga the barge-haulers are merely staffage, barely visible on the distant riverbank opposite. In the present work however, they are centre-stage and add an important genre element to the landscape. Burlaks on the Volga (fig.3), a somewhat unresolved genre sketch dated to 1871, gives us an insight into the origins of The Volga near Yurevets. Here, in the sketch, the barge-haulers are painted in large scale in the foreground. The faces of the first few peasants in the group are depicted in some detail, their expressions are painted in a rather over-romanticized style taking into account the physical hard labour of a barge-hauler.

The barge-haulers were immortalized by Ilya Repin in his painting Barge-haulers on the Volga (fig.5). Throughout the 1860s and 1870s several Russian artists were attracted to this theme which became something of symbol of social injustice following the long awaited but disappointing serf reforms of Tsar Alexander II’s reign. Vasily Vereshchagin’s work on this subject, now in the Kiev Museum of Russian Art (fig.4), was painted in 1866 (surely Repin must have had it in mind when as a 26 year old he painted his famous work). Both Savrasov and Repin worked on their canvasses independently around the same time, exhibiting them in 1871, Savrasov in Moscow and Repin in St Petersburg. Repin subsequently reworked his original canvas over a few years finishing the version we know today only in 1873.

As a landscape artist, Savrasov’s depiction and treatment of the barge-haulers at the outset naturally differed from that of Repin. However, judging by the existence of the 1871 genre sketch mentioned above, Savrasov did give particular importance to this group of figures. Sometime between painting the sketch and his finished composition, Savrasov shifts the main focus from the barge-haulers to the landscape, although he keeps some of the compositional elements of the group intact, such as the positioning of the front three peasants who press ahead of the rest of the men as the others tail back into the water. In his final composition, Savrasov’s band of peasants appears to move slowly through the river in a near solid block, devoid of individual detail. They are depicted as an organic and integrated part of the landscape through which they labour. In this work and in other paintings in his Volga series, Savrasov sought to reveal something essential about the daily life and character of the provincial Russian people through vignettes and traces of contemporary human existence scattered through the landscape.

Heralding the beginning of a decade of enduring masterpieces, The Volga near Yurevets numbers among Savrasov's best works. Undoubtedly his greatest achievement as an artist was in pioneering a whole new national landscape art, side-stepping the moribund conventions of the Academic salon and creating for the very first time monumental and enduringly beautiful images of Mother Russia in all her different moods and seasons. In The Volga near Yurevets, the individual elements and details from the burlaki, to the barge and sailboats, to the vastness of the river, and finally to the little church we can just see delightfully illuminated in the distance are bathed in a general atmosphere of rising tension brought on by an advancing storm. Through his technical mastery of colour and light as well as composition, Savrasov synthesizes all elements into a whole picture which, as with his best work, almost resonates with sound.

This exciting, recent reappearance of Savrasov's lost masterpiece means that art historians now finally will have the opportunity to reassess the importance of this painting in the artist's oeuvre and fully incorporate it into future scholarship on the artist. Nevertheless we can still find useful a painstakingly detailed analysis of the painting by Maltseva in her 1977 monograph, in which she refers in the text to a black and white photograph of the painting whose whereabouts at the time was not known, other than that it was in a French private collection (fig.1).

The inscription on the reverse, mostly likely applied by a restorer in 1908, indicates the painting was in the collection of Vladimir Fedorovich Mering. He was the youngest son of Friedrich Mering (1822-1887), a German professor at the Kiev University and a leading doctor of his time. A wealthy man, Vladimir Fedorovich collected furniture and paintings and is known to have donated Nesterov’s On the Mountains (1896) to the Museum of Russian Art in Kiev in the 1920s. Exactly how and when The Volga near Yurevets made its way outside of Russia is not known. Had the work been in a Soviet museum collection throughout the 20th century it would likely have become by now a well-loved and famous icon of 19th century Russian landscape painting.