Alexei Kondratevich Savrasov, 1830-1897

Alexei Savrasov was one of the greatest landscape painters of his generation and central to Moscow’s artistic life. For twenty-five years he taught at the School of Arts where Pavel Tretyakov was a governor, and his landscapes were amongst the first works which Tretyakov acquired for his gallery.

Savrasov began his career as a painter in the Romantic tradition, later producing pictures more tranquil in mood and based on minute observation of inconspicuous details in nature. His pictures reflect a particularly Russian outlook on the world, and it was this ability to imbue the most unremarkable features of the landscape with poetry, which Tretyakov so admired.

The 1880s were difficult times for Savrasov and very few paintings indeed are recorded from 1888, the year in which the offered work was executed. Savrasov was dismissed from the Moscow Art School in 1882, soon after which his close friend and fellow artist, Vasily Perov, died. By this time Savrasov was also suffering from alcoholism and losing his sight. Acutely aware that his place amongst the luminaries of Russian landscape painting had been taken by younger artists, Savrasov’s later works reflect a deepening disillusionment: the palette is more sombre, the landscapes have become increasingly desolate. Savrasov produced a number of variants of his 1871 masterpiece, The Rooks Have Arrived (fig.1), it has been suggested not only for financial reasons but also in an attempt to regain public attention.

In Winter Landscape Savrasov has pared the composition down to its barest elements yet still manages to capture the lyricism of the vast and empty Russian steppe. The precise treatment of the trees reveals a new preoccupation with draughtsmanship as Savrasov had begun to sketch increasingly in pencil and watercolour. There is a greater emphasis on the pictorial quality of his composition and the focus is no longer simply the sub-text of mood, but the effect created by the long, delicate branches against a leaden sky.