At the gates of the monastery. 1875 Alexey Kondratievich Savrasov (1830-1897)

Description of Alexei Savrasov’s painting "At the Monastery Gates".

Alexei Kondratievich Savrasov’s painting is unique in that it represents an amazing play of light and shadow. The painting At the Monastery Gates is part of the artist’s famous rainbow cycle of paintings, even though its significance is tinged - we see the rainbow somewhere behind the trees, in the thicket of the forest.

Anxious landscape with clouds overhanging the temple and pine trees, pulls the heavy skyline, which is about to overflow in a harsh summer downpour. The lingering heat of summer comes off the smooth water surface, the exhaustion comes off the whirring fresh bushes, all the smells of nature intensify and hover uncontrollably over the slope.

But in Savrasov’s painting it doesn’t look cruel and blinding; on the contrary, the light is diffused and broad and it illuminates the monastery entrance and people gravitate towards the light in the coolness of the white stone temple. The silence of the monastery’s backwater is broken only by the occasional splash of water in the lowlands, the unhurried steps of people quietly retreating to their cells. The rainbow lights up the sky with its brilliance and is about to hide somewhere in the air, disappearing before the next sunburn.

The viewers can see Savrasov’s artistry in all its beauty in every little detail of the landscape, in every birch leaf, reflecting the glare of the sun. The painting attracts the eye not only with such charming highlights as, say, the slope under the birch, but also with the houses on high ground, reflections on the water, and plants in their luxuriant blossom.

The answer to the question of why this particular landscape attracted the artist’s attention lies in his special attitude towards this place in Sergiev Posad near Moscow. The Kinovia hermitage depicted in the painting is just in the vicinity, where the artist so often vacationed with his family.