arkhipov girl with pitcher 1927 Abram Arkhipov (1862-1930)

Description of Abram Arkhipov’s painting The Girl with the Jug

A real Russian girl, lush, with a soft kind face, who is ready to get her guests drunk on delicious country milk. Krasna maiden! Beautiful!!!

There is something in this portrait from Kustodiev, but Kustodiev does not have that simplicity, his portraits are more like cheap popular, Russian, like a circle dance, and here it seems to be the Russian soul itself. And open and kind, with a strong powerful body and strong arms. And most importantly, not greedy to share the last. That’s how the Russian soul really is! It’s the soul that’s not invented, not polished, not invented, but purely folk.

But the main thing here is the color. The painter started painting so vividly on the themes of the peasants, even though before this cycle he had painted canvasses with rather gloomy tones and everything seemed desolate. But in this cycle, the artist opened in a different quality. A student of the great Russian painters Savrasov, Polenov, Pryanishnikov, Makovsky did not let his students down. He boldly experimented with colors. And made it so that Tretyakov personally bought from him paintings for the collection.

And indeed the girl is depicted brightly: orange blouse, red skirt apron with a pattern of reddish hues. She has a bright blue cup in her hand and a jug in her other hand. And that’s why it seems to us that it is presented too brightly, because the background is dark. That’s what makes it so bright. That’s why it seems to us that the girl is so glowing. By the way, even the blush on her face are so bright red... In general, the Russian beauty.

As for the artist himself, his life was all in the work. He really did a lot for the development of Russian art school after the revolution of 1917. He did not let the origins be forgotten, did not betray to oblivion the great names of our school of painting. And this at a time when all the old was completely forgotten, and the new smelled of uncultivation. For this alone we should be grateful to this painter. He did not betray his teachers.