Moonlit Night. Swamp. 1870 Alexey Kondratievich Savrasov (1830-1897)

Description of Alexei Savrasov’s painting "Moonlit Night. Swamp."

Created in 1870. Materials - canvas, oil, size - 46.8 by 80.5 cm. Located in the Serpukhov Historical and Art Museum, Serpukhov, Russia.

In this work once again beautifully manifested boundless love of Alexei Kondratievich to the Russian nature. Nowadays his attention is attracted by the marsh, not the most popular subject in painting, especially at night. Obviously, in vain, the viewer realizes, looking at the wonderful canvas.

The artist’s brush shows a vast, undulating and breathing space, going far into the pitch darkness in the distance. A part of the panorama, however, is illuminated by the uneven light of the moon peeking through the cloudy night sky. In its silvery yellowish glow a section of standing water, full of reflections and framed by touches of rushes, and a hard rocky shore, overgrown in some places with grass and small bushes can be seen. To the right, closer to the center, a puff of smoke is strewn about-it may be a campfire, but what prudent person would start one there? Unless he wants to go unnoticed... Or it could be a sign of an incipient fire in the peat bogs.

At first glance, the restrained color scheme resembles grisaille, when in art a gradient of only one color is used to depict all objects. But upon further examination, one can see not only black and transparently ochre tones, but also blue, greenish and bluish. Softly painted shadows and bright patches of highlights on the plants give the work volume and striking authenticity. It’s quite possible that the artist sketched from life or walked around the depicted area when it gets dark.

The overall mood of the work, inadvertently prompts thoughts not only of the calm and the great, but also of ghosts wandering the bolts or the dogs of Baskerville, although by that time this tale had not yet been written by Conan Doyle.