Swamp in the forest. Autumn

The artist is Vasiliev

In 1871, Vasiliev fell ill with tuberculosis in the third decade of his life. He was forced to leave Petersburg and leave for Ukraine in the village of Syuen, and then to the Crimea, from where he was no longer destined to return. Living in Yalta, he experienced great life difficulties. A small loan of the Society for the Promotion of Artists did not have enough for the maintenance of the family and expenses that work on the paintings required. His longing was great along the northern forests and swamps with their incomparable freshness and expanse, relatives and friends of him with nothing. And the master continued to work on paintings of the Central Russian nature, using preserved sketches and his unusually tenacious memory. So the “wet meadow”, “abandoned mill”, “morning” were created. One of the last was the canvas “The Swamp in the Forest. Autumn “, begun in 1872 and belonging to the most remarkable Russian landscapes of the 70s of the XIX century. In the color scheme of the picture, in the system of painting with the use of a wide dynamic smear Vasilyev, the general level and the possibility of the art of his time, anticipating the achievement of Russian painting of the 1890s, has significantly ahead.

Shortly before his death he wrote and. Kramsky: “Oh, swamp, swamp! How painfully the heart is compressed from a grave foreboding! Well, can I really breathe again with this, with this life -giving force waking up above the smoke water in the morning?””. Having depicted autumn trees against the backdrop of a dark blue cloud, the artist forced the copper-golden crowns of puffy oaks to burn with extraordinary force, supporting this ringing color accent with a complex accompaniment of yellow and red shades in the background of the distant plate. Vasiliev combined the memories of the beautiful autumn decoration of Russian forests with observations made by him in the Crimean mountains, colored in the fall by unusually bright and fresh color spots. Autumn oaks frozen in eveiled silence seemed to shine in warm rays of the sun. Running, some mysterious silhouettes of marsh birds among green and rusty red vegetation bring a note of mystery, thoughtfulness and sadness, very typical for the last paintings of Vasiliev. The characteristic romance of the figurative system received mainly elegic sound here. The painting of the picture is free and expressive in every smear, being extremely accurate and thought out in numerous nuances. About your impressions of the picture and. Kramskoy wrote to the author: "The real picture-nothing like anything, does not imitate anyone, does not have the slightest, even distant similarity with any artist or with any school, this is something to so distinctive and isolated from all influences, standing outside the current the movements of art that I can say only one thing: this is still… Not quite good, … But this is brilliant".