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Easter procession in a village

Vasily Grigorievich Perov • Painting, 1861, 71.5×89 cm
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About the artwork
Art form: Painting
Subject and objects: Genre scene
Style of art: Realism
Technique: Oil
Materials: Canvas
Date of creation: 1861
Size: 71.5×89 cm
Artwork in collection: The Wanderers Irina Olikh
Artwork in selections: 31 selections
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Description of the artwork «Easter procession in a village»

In 1861, the illegitimate son of a prosecutor from Tobolsk, Vasily Perov, received a gold medal from the Imperial Academy of Arts and the right to travel abroad. The young talent “thanked” the academic authorities and painted the Easter Procession in a Village, an “immoral, insolent and mocking” picture. The public saw satire in the subject, and the church authorities accused the artist of having chosen a single dirty episode from life and deliberately emphasizing human vices and weaknesses. The Synod representatives protested and demanded to remove the canvas from the display. For the creation of the Easter Procession in a Village, Perov was promised a new trip, to Solovki. The opinions of critics were divided: some saw a defender of the people and an exposer of social vices in the artist, others — a draftsman of the unsightly sides of life who killed the high art. While disputes were raging in society, the patron of arts Pavel Tretyakov bought the Easter Procession in a Village, exhibited the painting in the gallery and, by force of his authority, defended Perov from the government’s discontent.

Vasily Perov observed the subjects of his future paintings from his early childhood. Being an illegitimate child, he did not have the right to inherit the title and fortune of his father, and until the end of his life, he did not get rid of the financial problems. Therefore, the talented artist chose familiar and exciting subjects for his paintings: village life, begging, inheritance partitioning, drunken revelry. Perov became the founder of the pictorial direction of critical realism. Cripples and beggars, war invalids and peasants in rags, emaciated children and unrestrained drunkards came to life on his canvases and talked about hunger, dirt and dullness more than satirical pamphlets.

Why did the Easter Procession in a Village painting not please the authorities and the clergy?
The viewer can see a discordant drunken procession with icons and banners against the backdrop of a gloomy spring village landscape. The congregation with the priest goes out of a peasant hut. The spiritual squalor of the subjects overshadows the physical poverty. The priest in his festive vestments looks dazed, he stepped on an Easter egg, lowered the cross and hardly stands on his legs. Nearby are two peasants; one is trying to get to his feet, the other one is sleeping soundly. A young peasant woman with a shabby icon in her hands sings a prayer and walks away from the procession. On the porch, the hostess of the house pours water and tries to revive her drunken husband. An old man in rags carries an upturned icon and does not notice the embarrassment. The artist amazingly conveyed the state of the three figures at the head of the procession, the peasants in festive clothes: two of them are drunk and cheerful, and the third one, with his back turned to the viewer, is shrouded in a clearly readable halo of sobriety and condemnation of the ongoing disgrace. A cloudy spring landscape, bare tree branches, puddles and mud underfoot intensify the mood, and the landscape with a deep perspective shows that the path to the temple is long and tiring and the procession participants will hardly get there in a “decent form”.

Thus, what kind of message did Perov put into his Easter Procession in a Village painting — angry criticism of the clergy and the existing way of life, or reflection of everyday peasant realities? The priests did not receive salary from the Russian Empire, therefore, to increase their income, they came up with a ritual of Easter “glorification”: they went to peasant farmsteads, came into huts and sang church chants. The rural procession in Perov’s painting takes place during the Bright Week, the week after Easter. The procession trampled in the mud for a week, dragged around the yards expecting for donations. The spring time was rather hungry and difficult for the peasants, thus they considered the procession a rip-off, saved the remnants of food, and paid the priests with alcohol and then saw the guests off the hut. Perov's subject matter here is not satirical. In the Easter Procession in a Village, the artist showed the everyday peasant life during the reform period of 1861 without pretentious drama or embellishment. On the canvas, Russia is shown in the time of the abolition of serfdom: the gloomy and dirty country drowned in ignorance and disbelief.

 
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