Waterfall. 1868 Alexey Kondratievich Savrasov (1830-1897)

Description of Alexei Savrasov’s painting "Waterfall

Shishkin, Levitan, Korovin, Savrasov... Great names who praised all the beauty of Russia and beyond. Often these artists traveled to Europe or very near to the Caucasus. The same Levitan with pleasure on the paintings depicted the mountain ranges of the Caucasus expanses.

Savrasov, too, apparently could not resist the temptation to portray something mountainous. And here it is - a landscape, which in its grandeur is not inferior to any of his paintings or paintings of his colleagues. It has everything: mountain passes in the background, and eternal oaks on the bank of a waterfall. The waterfall is the main force of nature of the mountains. And how accurately the artist was able to capture the play of light of water and sun.

The canvas is somewhere almost dark and somewhere quite light. This is an amazing ability not to overdo, to find the golden mean in the portrayal of probably the most complex element in the picture - light and shade. This filigree is amazing. But the most amazing thing in this painting is the sense of the noise of the waterfall. One has the impression of hearing its life, of hearing its even and even monotonous sound. It’s like a perpetual motor.

Savrasov is one of those great landscape painters who almost never forgot to sketch details. Look at the rocks, how they are clearly and at the same time not quite brightly drawn. In fact, they are the main characters of the canvas, because without them, there would be no waterfall itself. There would just be a nice jolly mountain stream flowing in front of us and nothing more... But here is a waterfall with its own power, its own history, its own life.

But it’s worth going back to the light and shade design. It is clearly compositional, in the center of the canvas. It’s the brightest spot of light. Then it just gives a nice shade for the rest of the canvas and shows what’s in the shade. First of all we focused on the sides of the waterfall that are heavily vegetated. It is understandable, water and plants are interconnected.