Alexei Alexandrovich Pisemsky

Original canvas. The picture is clean and ready to hang. There are stretcher marks along the edges and down the centre, along which there is a fine line of craquelure. UV light reveals retouching along all the edges and further spots of retouching in places throughout. Unframed.
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The son of a landowner, Alexei Pisemsky grew up in the densely wooded province of Kostroma, north-east of Yaroslavl. His uncle was a famous writer, Alexei Feofilaktovich Pisemsky, regarded as an equal of Ivan Turgenev in his time. Alexei Alexandrovich began his studies at secondary school in the regional town of Kostroma, but at the insistence of his patron he left before finishing the course in order to enrol at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg (1878-1890). He studied landscape painting under Mikhail Klodt and Yuli Klever and exhibited with the Itinerants from 1887-1889. He is best known for his oils, which were immensely popular among collectors including Pavel Tretyakov and the Imperial family, but he was also a stalwart member of the Society of Russian Watercolourists and celebrated illustrator. Remarkably for the period, he travelled to North Africa in the 1890s.

 

The Edge of the Forest is likely to have been painted in the late 1880s. Typical of landscapes of the period it is devoid of human presence but the receding line of the fence which acts as the entry point into the canvas and restrains the burgeoning wilderness, reminds the viewer of man's role as an arbiter of order. The feathery crop scattered with wild flowers at the margins is especially noteworthy, painted in a confident manner that immediately conveys the fresh vitality of the cultivated field.