Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov

Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov (Russian:1830 – 1897) was a Russian landscape painter and creator of the lyrical landscape style.

Savrasov was born into the family of a merchant. He began to draw early and in 1838 he enrolled as a student of professor Rabus at the Moscow School of painting, sculpturing and architecture (graduated in 1850), and immediately began to specialize in landscape painting.

In 1852, he traveled to the Ukraine. Then, in 1854 by the invitation of the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna, president of the Russian Academy of Arts, he moved to the neighborhood of Saint Petersburg. In 1857, Savrasov became a teacher in the Moscow School of painting, sculpturing and architecture. His best disciples, Isaac Levitan and Constantin Korovin, remembered their teacher with admiration and gratitude.

The Rooks have Come Back was painted by Savrasov near Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma.In 1857 he married Sophia Carlovna Hertz, sister of art historian K. Hertz. In their home they entertained artistic people and collectors including Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov. Savrasov became especially close with Vasily Perov. Perov helped him paint the figures of the boat trackers in Savrasov's Volga near Yurievets, Savrasov painted landscapes for Perov's Bird catcher and Hunters on Bivouac.

In the 1860s, he traveled to England to see the International Exhibition, and to Switzerland. In one of his letters he wrote No academies in the world could so advanced an artist as the present world exhibition. The painters who influenced him most were British painter John Constable and Swiss painter Alexandre Calame.

The Rooks Have Come Back (1871) is considered by many critics to be the high point in Savrasov’s artistic career. Using a common, even trivial, episode of birds returning home, and an extremely simple landscape, Savrasov emotionally showed the transition of nature from winter to spring. It was a new type of lyrical landscape painting, called later by critics the mood landscape. The painting brought him fame.

In 1870 he became a member of Peredvizhniki group, breaking with government-sponsored academic art.

The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from the existing paintings.h

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