Savrasov, Aleksey Kondratyevich

Aleksey Kondratyevich Savrasov, (born May 12 [May 24, New Style], 1830, Moscow, Russia—died Sept. 26 [Oct. 8], 1897, Moscow), Russian artist who was the founder of Russian lyrical landscape painting and the painter of such popular Russian paintings as The Rooks Have Returned (1871).

Savrasov studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1844 to 1854. His early works, painted after his graduation, show Romantic tendencies. One of these paintings, View in the Neighbourhood of Oranienbaum (1854), earned him membership in the Russian Academy of Art.

During the 1860s Savrasov visited various European countries, and from 1870 to 1875 he traveled on the Volga every summer. Gradually he abandoned Romantic mannerisms in his work and began to focus increasingly on calm visual narrative and the illustration of commonplace realistic landscapes typical of central Russia and his beloved Moscow (Losiny Island in Sokolniki, 1869; Volga Vista Below Yuryevets, 1871).

The showing of The Rooks Have Returned at the first exhibition (1871) of the Peredvizhniki (“Wanderers”)—a group that Savrasov had helped to found in 1870—was an important landmark in Russian landscape art of the 19th century. The canvas signified the birth of a new aesthetic, different from the academic or Romantic. Savrasov purposely avoided painting picturesque locales or composing artificially panoramic vistas but chose instead a perfectly mundane corner of a village, one like many others in Russia. He made a conscious decision to reveal the spiritual beauty in the most typical landscape: a church, wooden buildings, bare birch trees, rooks building nests, dirty snow beginning to melt. Nature waking up after winter, with a faint suggestion of Eastertide (the main holiday in the Eastern Orthodox calendar), is represented in masterly fashion in delicate tones of brown, blue, violet, and gold. The same simple subject—a country road after the rain—and the same lyrical mood are manifested in another of his well-known paintings, A Country Road (1873). Savrasov copied his paintings many times for different patrons.

He taught the landscape painting class at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture for many years (1857–82) and counted among his students a great many superb artists, among them Isaak Levitan and Konstantin Korovin.