A Brief Note on Tretyakov’s Landscapes.
Towards the end of the 1850s Tretyakov wrote to the landscape painter Apollinary Goravsky the following words:” I need neither richness in nature nor effective use of light: no miracles. Give me a murky puddle, so long as it contains truth and poetry. There is poetry to be found in everything, that is the artist’s business.”[1] This is the credo of the nineteenth-century realist painters who sought for honesty in nature. The majority of works by landscape artists were acquired in the 1870s and 1880s including works by Alexi Sarasov, Mikhail Klodt, Lev Kamenev, and Ivan Shiskin. Klodt sold Tretyakov High Road in Autumn and similar works at discounted rates. Shiskin was an especially favoured artist and friend; his Midday. On the Outskirts of Moscow was bought by Tretyakov from the Imperial Academy which pleased the painter. In the 1860s and 1870s Sarasov was an important artist in the life of Moscow where he taught landscape painting. His The Rooks have Returned (above) was exhibited at the inaugural exhibition of the Peredvizhniki or Wanderers Society, but eventually came into Tretyakov’s gallery. A measure of Tretyakov’s faith in these upcoming landscape painters can be seen in his gamble on the purchase of a small painting called Autumn Day in 1879. The author of this humble work was Isaak Levitan who went on to become the most famous landscape artist of his generation.
[1] Cited in Galina Churak, “Landscape Painting in the Tretyakov Gallery” in Russian Landscape, 123.
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