UNIT 5
Moscow Courtyard
Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov was a Russian landscape painter associated with the Peredvizhniki movement of realist artists. He painted a number of pictures in the spirit of Academism on subjects taken from the European history, he also worked a lot in the open air. In the late 1870s, Polenov concentrated on painting landscapes in the realist tradition of Aleksey Savrasov and Fyodor Vasilyev. He attempted to impart the silent poetry of Russian nature, related to daily human life.
"The Moscow courtyard"(1878) is Polenov's celebrated painting of a traditional Russian courtyard. Starting with homely patch of ground behind a small house of a type very common at that time, he showed the sheds and the well that belonged to it, and in the background more wooden dwellings and a church with its five golden cupolas and tall, tent-roofed bell tower, the outline of still another church in the distance to the right.
The artist depicted a typical Moscow courtyard of the 18-19th centuries. Old mansions of that time in Moscow were surrounded by gardens and wooden dwellings, that’s why Moscow was often called a “large village”. Polenov created an image full of peace and serenity. The bright colours of the picture reflect the joy of everyday life.
The canvas is permeated with the freshness of colour and sunlit lyricism not to be found in Russian painting before him. He was the one of the first Russian artists who achieved a plain air freshness of color combined with artistic finish of composition. The principles developed by Polenov had a great impact on further development of Russian (and especially Soviet) landscape painting.