Landscape with a rainbow. 1881 Alexey Kondratievich Savrasov (1830-1897)

Description of Alexei Savrasov’s painting Landscape with Rainbow

Alexei Savrasov’s unusual artistic destiny began at a time when the young man was already twenty-four years old. After becoming an academician, he continued to work hard in order to finish his painting The Rooks Have Arrived in time to present it at the 1st Traveling Exhibition. Undoubtedly, it was evaluated by the critics and the jury as one of the best paintings of our time. This event determined the importance of the author’s work in the Russian art of the mid-19th century.

Already by this time, the artist, and by combining this with a teacher, had won his authority in the Moscow artistic environment.

He painted many paintings, but none of the canvases could eclipse the admirable charm of this work. The beauty of nature in "Landscape with Rainbow" is rendered unusually fresh and pure. It seems as if the air is transparent. Despite the fact that the sky is covered with gray colors, the rays of colorful cheerful rainbow stretching upwards, give the general grayness a kind of magical joy and fill life with colors. The gloomy sky gradually fades into the distance, and white birds soar joyfully in the sky. The bright colors of the sky come through, filling the entire surface with light, penetrating through the spruces and trees that stretch upward toward the rainbow.

This painting is devoid of features of sentimentalism and panorama effect, which is what distinguished Savrasov from other artists. He was inherent in the method of execution of the landscape in a realistic style. He chose a simple compositional perspective, liked to experiment with complex tonal transitions and muted color scheme.

To convey the emotional state of nature, having an excellent developed sense of sensitivity, the canvas in the hands of the artist turned into an "expressive story", which tacitly described the selfless love of man to his native land.