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Rainbow
Alexey Savrasov • Painting, 1875, 44×56.5 cm
Description of the artwork «Rainbow»
The rainbow is one of the favourite images of the artist Alexei Savrasov. His rainbows are not a decoration; in their depiction, it is not only masterly skill of light and color, like Kuindzhi's is important. Savrasov’s rainbows are windows into the inexpressible.
We see a post-lightning landscape, extremely bright greenery washed by the water of a thundering downpour, the sun’s rays are trying to break through the cloud-covered sky. In the Rainbow painting, we see Savrasov’s favourite move: the exact feeling that the next moment the sun will appear. Here, Savrasov’s colourist skill is shown in full force — this is evidenced by the skilful combination of warm, reddish tones of the earth, emerald mossy greenery and the transparent sky.
Rainbow is painted as though it’s wide open to meet the viewer. It seems that a fresh wind comes from the picture, the viewer “can hear” a special post-thunder silence, which is only broken by the occasional bird trills and the sound of buckets on the yoke. The steps made in the hill connect the foreground and background and at the same time serve as a staircase for the viewer, as if drawing him into the depths of the picture.
The landscape looks festive, while there is no embellishment in it, nature itself seems to celebrate the end of the rain, the rainbow and the sun shining over the vast expanses to fill the sky and the earth with its light in the next moment. A peasant woman with a shoulder-yoke is walking up to the steps, carved in the hill. In the background, there are squat huts. As it is usual with Savrasov: an everyday landscape, giving the feeling not of everyday life, but of being, eternal, everlasting, shining in every detail. A kind of romanticism transformed through the artist’s vision, looking for the ideal not in distant space, but discovering it everywhere, in everything that the eye falls on.
Savrasov’s landscapes are characterized by a special painful lyricism, the primordial Russian hidden longing is clearly seen even in his brightest paintings. No wonder the artist is considered the creator of the Russian lyrical landscape. His student Levitan said: “Savrasov tried to find those intimate, deeply touching, often sad features that are so strongly felt in our native landscape and so irresistibly affect the soul in the simplest and most ordinary things.”
Author: Alain Esaulova
We see a post-lightning landscape, extremely bright greenery washed by the water of a thundering downpour, the sun’s rays are trying to break through the cloud-covered sky. In the Rainbow painting, we see Savrasov’s favourite move: the exact feeling that the next moment the sun will appear. Here, Savrasov’s colourist skill is shown in full force — this is evidenced by the skilful combination of warm, reddish tones of the earth, emerald mossy greenery and the transparent sky.
Rainbow is painted as though it’s wide open to meet the viewer. It seems that a fresh wind comes from the picture, the viewer “can hear” a special post-thunder silence, which is only broken by the occasional bird trills and the sound of buckets on the yoke. The steps made in the hill connect the foreground and background and at the same time serve as a staircase for the viewer, as if drawing him into the depths of the picture.
The landscape looks festive, while there is no embellishment in it, nature itself seems to celebrate the end of the rain, the rainbow and the sun shining over the vast expanses to fill the sky and the earth with its light in the next moment. A peasant woman with a shoulder-yoke is walking up to the steps, carved in the hill. In the background, there are squat huts. As it is usual with Savrasov: an everyday landscape, giving the feeling not of everyday life, but of being, eternal, everlasting, shining in every detail. A kind of romanticism transformed through the artist’s vision, looking for the ideal not in distant space, but discovering it everywhere, in everything that the eye falls on.
Savrasov’s landscapes are characterized by a special painful lyricism, the primordial Russian hidden longing is clearly seen even in his brightest paintings. No wonder the artist is considered the creator of the Russian lyrical landscape. His student Levitan said: “Savrasov tried to find those intimate, deeply touching, often sad features that are so strongly felt in our native landscape and so irresistibly affect the soul in the simplest and most ordinary things.”
Author: Alain Esaulova
