The Volga near Yurevets is the first large scale composition Savrasov made on the subject of the Volga river, having moved to Yaroslavl with his family in early 1870. The painting 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.

Throughout the 1860s and 1870s several Russian artists were attracted to the theme of the barge-haulers, which became something of a 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, was painted in 1866. The subject was immortalized by Ilya Repin in his painting Barge-haulers on the Volga, now in the State Russian Museum (fig.1). Both Savrasov and Repin worked on their canvases independently around the same time. Having exhibited his work in St Petersburg in 1871, 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. In Savrasov’s work, the main focus is shifted from the barge-haulers to the landscape. 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.

Savrasov included the present work 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. The work earned the artist first prize in the landscape section and stayed 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'. Sovremennaya letopis' (a weekend supplement to the newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti) reported that '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'.

Heralding the beginning of a decade of enduring masterpieces, The Volga near Yurevets numbers among Savrasov's best works. 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. In her seminal 1977 monograph Faina Maltseva offered a painstakingly detailed analysis of the painting, referring 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.2). The inscription on the reverse, mostly likely applied by a restorer in 1908, indicates the painting was at that time 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 to France 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.