Dirt road Alexey Kondratievich Savrasov (1830-1897)

Description of Alexei Savrasov’s painting "Proselok".

A painting by the great 19th-century Russian impressionist painter Alexei Kondratievich Savrasov, Proselok, was painted in 1873. The canvas depicts a simple and enchanting Russian land, grass washed by the rain that has just passed and a washed-out road. The viewer can only see a swampy area in the foreground, while in the distance you can see trees and even a golden wheat field. Clouds cover the sky, but not for long; soon the sun will appear from behind them to dry out the soggy land with its hot summer rays.

In the right part of the painting the artist depicts a piece of the hill, as if inviting the viewer to look behind the canvas and continue his further way in the quietness and tranquility of the country road, the dawn sky and the freshness of the wet grass. The painting is as if in a foggy haze, and only in the distance the blue sky is seen, and there are clear signs of the coming day, which threatens to be sunny and warm.

The canvas is both soothing and evokes memories of the thunderstorm that just passed, the reflections of which are still reflected in the puddles on the country road. Despite the fact that today the painting is one of the epochal in the artist’s work, he himself was disappointed with it and did not feel much pride in his work.

Maybe that’s why he readily gave Proleselok to his friend I. Pryanishnikov, who kept it for a long time in his closed home collection and presented it to the public only in 1893, just a few years before the artist’s death. Strange as it may seem, he liked the painting and even earned a lot of praise, although it was compared to the paintings of another landscape artist - Fyodor Vasilyev, which the author was not delighted about, defending the primacy of the idea to the very end.