UNIT 5
“A Religious Procession in a Village at Easter”
Vasily Grigorevich Perov (January 2, 1834 - June 10 1882) was a Russian painter and one of the founding members of Peredvizhniki, a group of Russian realist painters.
His earliest canvases (“Sermon in the Village” and others) show that he is also a critic of his surroundings. In his pictures he ruthlessly exposes the survivals of serfdom, the merchants, the nobility, the clergy and depicts the life of poor oppressed working people.
“A religious procession in a Village at Easter” gives us a sad picture of the ignorance and wretchedness of village life, with the somber sky, the muddy road and bare trees of the landscape heightening the impression of hopeless dreariness. The drunken priest is shown in caricature, and there is no idealization of the peasants – they appear just as they really were
For his “Sermon in a Village”, painted as a diploma work in 1861, the St. Petersburg Academy awarded Perov the Grand Gold medal and subsidized his trip abroad. The same year, 1861, Perov’s Easter Procession in a Village was removed from the exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of Artists for the insult to the clergy. In connection with this picture one of Perov’s contemporaries remarked, ‘Instead of Italy Perov might be exiled to the Solovetsky Islands’. The work was the manifest of critical realism. Both the subject matter and the handling of it were new and unusual. Perov advisedly chose to paint the reality plain and even filthy. Perov’s Easter Procession in a Village marked the beginning of a new period leading to Repin’s Religious Procession in the Province of Kursk.