Spring day. 1873 Alexey Kondratievich Savrasov (1830-1897)

Description of Alexei Savrasov’s painting "Spring Day".

The painting Spring Day was painted in oil on canvas in 1873. The volume of the canvas is 95 x 140.

Today the painting is open to the public and is housed in the Vladimir-Suzdal Museum.

The author conveys with incredible accuracy the landscape, populated with a huge number of details and small elements.

In creating this masterpiece, Savrasov did painstaking work. The picture looks more like a photograph, because Savrasov with jewelry precision traced all the elements of the landscape. Performing this work, the author used a graphic technique that allows the most profound and realistic conveyance of the nuances of light on the canvas.

Even the minutest nuances, coming out from under the brush of a professional become the most important symbolic units of the canvas. The painting’s surface is smooth, without visually noticeable transitions.

In the center of the painting is a large puddle, sometimes underlain by thin ice. A clear, blue sky is reflected in it. Snow is still thawing in places. Just as important a part of the landscape is the open gate at the beginning of the ornate path. This is the path that leads to the apartment houses. According to the rules of straight perspective, the objects in the background should be less significant compared to those in the foreground.

However, the houses are drawn so well that one gets the feeling that it’s not a big frozen water, but these very unsightly houses that are the center of the picture. The trees in the painting are still bare, not awake from their winter sleep, which indicates an early spring.

Despite the abundance of cold tones, the picture is quite light, with a clearly visible source of light.

At first glance it may seem that the painting "Spring Day" has no dynamics, but this is not the case. The dynamics of the work is embedded in the plot of the picture itself. The birds are already outdoors after the cold winter and the sun is warming the snow hillocks in a springtime way.