Impression from Vasiliev’s painting “wet meadow”. History of creation and description of Vasiliev’s painting “Wet Meadow”

// Essay-description based on the painting by F.A. Vasiliev “Wet Meadow”

How beautiful the landscape of F.A. seems to me. Vasiliev "Wet meadow". Looking at the picture, I am immediately attracted by the variety of shades and colors that are simultaneously located on one canvas.

A thunderstorm recently passed over the meadow. It ended, and the dark thunderclouds were carried by gusts of wind further beyond the horizon. Over the meadow there are still accumulated dark clouds, but they no longer pose a threat. They follow their brothers across the endless expanses of heaven.

The two parts of the painting - light and dark - create a magnificent contrast in the picture. Somewhere in the distance, the sounds of passing thunder are alternately heard and bright bursts of lightning are visible. Most likely, the distant forest is completely covered by a wall of pouring rain. And the foreground is illuminated by the bright rays of the sun, which broke through the clouds.

Everything in this picture seems alive. The magnificent play of colors and colors creates a feeling of movement of trees, flowers and grasses.

The author gives most of the picture to the sky. And it’s impossible to stop admiring that palette, those magnificent shades that create the image of the sky after the rain. How much skill is invested in the ingenious combination of colors. How masterfully we see the awakening of nature after a rain storm. Everything is alive and enjoying life. The bad weather ended in this meadow. All living plants rejoice in the freshness that remains after the rain.

The painting “Wet Meadow” evokes a storm of emotions in me. How realistic everything is here. I cannot believe that the author reproduced all the details of the canvas from his memory. The distant forest seems blurry to us, not clear. But the bushes and green blades of grass in the foreground are clearly drawn and highlighted. Looking at the canvas, I feel the wet and fresh aroma of rain, I smell grass. And these sensations evoke the most pleasant emotions in me. Painting by F.A. Vasilyeva’s “Wet Meadow” is simply magnificent.


Essay based on Vasiliev's painting "Wet Meadow"

An essay based on the painting by F. A. Vasiliev “Wet Meadow”.
Vasilyev’s painting Wet Meadow was painted by the artist in 1872, based on his imagination while in Crimea due to illness. Crimean landscapes Vasiliev did not really like them and were difficult for the artist. Being impressed by the past, he decided to paint a picture about his native land, which later became a masterpiece of Russian landscape. Vasiliev wanted to express in his painting the motif of nature with a passing thunderstorm, only that there was a torrential rain, the clouds are hastily leaving. The rumble of thunder can still be heard in the distance. The cloudy sky, which occupies more than half of the canvas in the painting Wet Meadow, sets the main mood of the state of nature for the work; the lower part of the painting reflects complete calm. The plot of the painting is simple; the artist spectacularly conveys the space with a forest stretching into the distance. In the center of attention is a shallow pond, in which thunderclouds illuminated by the evening sun are softly reflected. The bushes of wet grass in the foreground are worked out in more detail. Playing on the contrast of the state of nature, Vasiliev simply superbly showed the viewer a painfully familiar native nature during a passing thunderstorm. The painting Wet Meadow was presented by the artist in St. Petersburg at the promotion union competition talented artists, where the work was awarded the second prize. Today the painting Wet Meadow is in the Tretyakov Gallery.
In Vasiliev’s painting “Wet Meadow,” the artist showed endless expanses, a meadow covered with water, and a gloomy sky stretched above all this beauty. It is so gray and heavy that it is ready to crush the earth with its weight. To convey the tragedy of the situation, the author used a mixture of white and gray. He also increased the space allocated for the sky, but slightly reduced the meadow. Under this menacing sky lies a green meadow, which is almost completely flooded with water. It exudes coolness and moisture. It seems that if you touch the painting, you will feel this moisture in your palm. The water that has captured the meadow is depicted in dark colors. She's a little off-putting. Just because of the water, the meadow seems lonely and abandoned, like a small puppy who was thrown out into the cold, autumn rain.
In the distance you can see spreading trees, which give the whole picture a tragic quality. They look so lonely and lost that they want to cry.
Vasiliev's painting "Wet Meadow" is a vivid depiction of the unpredictability of nature. This is an extremely realistic canvas that evokes acute feeling pity for all living things - and leads to a state of light, thoughtful sadness.

Description of the painting by F. A. Vasiliev “Wet Meadow”.
The phenomenon of the “artistic origin” of the landscape painter Fyodor Aleksandrovich Vasiliev always surprises everyone who in one way or another comes into contact with his work. Art critic L.I. Iovleva notes that he appeared on the horizon of Russian art in the 1860s at the age of eighteen, almost as a self-taught boy. But somehow unexpectedly, almost suddenly, he became an equal among the leading artists of that time. On “equal terms” he participated in exhibitions with them, on “equal terms” he won competitions and in two or three years he achieved such professional success, which others took years, and sometimes even a lifetime, to conquer.
A cheerful, witty and temperamental young man, Vasiliev was sick with consumption - an incurable disease at that time. He went to Crimea and lived in Yalta for the last two years. On the streets of Yalta, almonds were falling, roses were blooming, the “Judas tree” was dressed in a lush, dense pink outfit, magnolias were blooming, large clusters of wisteria were hanging from flexible lashes-branches. But the artist was possessed by an irresistible craving for his native land, for the discreet charm of Russian nature.
In Yalta, Vasiliev for a long time portrayed old, familiar and painfully dear to him northern motifs. Among the album drawings, where he made pencil sketches of the Crimean nature that was new to him, there are landscapes of central Russia sketched from memories.
In Crimea, Vasilyev also painted the painting “Wet Meadow”, one of the masterpieces of Russian landscape painting. There will be no mighty mountains, no cypress trees, no lush southern flowers, no azure sea - just a wet meadow washed by rain under a huge sky, a few trees in the distance and shadows running across the wet grass driven by the wind clouds
The storm is leaving, but the sky is still boiling and seething. With menacing haste, shaggy clouds rush and collide, the rumble of thunder can still be heard - everything in the picture is full of movement, everything lives and breathes: trees bending under the gusts of wind, and rippling water, and the sky. Even especially the sky, imbued with a typically Vasilyevsky mood, which is contrasted on the canvas with ominous clouds, still pouring streams of rain onto the forest visible in the distance.
The sky always plays a significant role in Vasiliev’s paintings, and in “Wet Meadow” it is perhaps the main means of expressing the artist’s poetic thought. A sparkling warm opening in the clouds, reflected in the water and supported by reflections on the ground, fights against huge dark and cold clouds and shadows running along the ground.
As if in contrast to the intensity of the sky, the rest of the landscape is extremely simple and its lines are softer and calmer. Each detail of the picture (and there are many of them on this canvas) is a variation of the main theme, but all the details are so dissolved as a whole that you can recognize them only with a very careful examination.
At first glance, “Wet Meadow” attracts the viewer with its simplicity and familiarity of the motif. In the depths of a wide depression rise two spreading trees. Far behind them, in the gray haze of the forest, a strip of sky appears. A steep slope stretches along the lowland, and in front - almost in the center - a swampy backwater with marshy banks glistens.
That, in fact, is all that is depicted on the canvas of Fyodor Vasiliev. But his contemporaries saw him in this picture as more than even a generalized image dear to the artist northern nature. The painting captivates the viewer with the extraordinary depth of the inspired landscape, the immediacy of the feelings and moods embedded in it. Vasiliev never presents nature as “cold, eternal and indifferent.” He constantly looked for harmony and purity in her. The moods of struggle and resistance expressed in “Wet Meadow” - on the one hand, and on the other - sadness and melancholy captivate and involuntarily force one to return to the sad biography of its 22-year-old author.
The composition of “Wet Meadow,” as already mentioned, is extremely simple and relaxed, and at the same time it is difficult to imagine a more thoughtful and monumental work. In the picture it is easy to distinguish the compositional center to which the main lines of the landscape converge - the outlines of a hillside, the banks of a creek, paths, the boundaries of light and shadow in a meadow, a strip of forest. Visual center, which organizes the whole picture, is dark silhouette two mighty trees. Vasiliev shifted him to the right of geometric center, and that is why the picture does not look static.
Space unfolds surprisingly smoothly and boldly in “Wet Meadow,” especially the sky with its boiling and seething, with its play of light and its cosmic infinity. And at the same time, each bush of grass in the foreground reproduces with botanical accuracy the vegetation of central Russia.
"Wet Meadow" was submitted to the competition of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists in St. Petersburg in 1872 and received second prize (the first was awarded to the painting by I. Shishkin " Pinery").
When the head of the Peredvizhniki Kramskoy saw “Wet Meadow” by Fyodor Vasiliev, he was shocked. And the clean spring greenery, and the flying light, and the silent breeze that rippled the water in the overgrown riverbed, and the invisible drops of rain on the wet foliage of the trees - everything spoke of an extraordinary artist and sensitive to “the noise and music of nature.”

An essay based on a painting by F. A. Vasiliev. "Wet Meadow"
Fedor Alexandrovich Vasiliev - famous landscape painter nineteenth century. He worked hard and fruitfully. In 1870 he caught a bad cold. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Doctors recommended that he travel to the south. Vasiliev goes to Crimea. But he doesn't really like it there. He misses Russia. Therefore, the artist plans to paint a new picture.
He does not paint the lush nature of southern Russia. In the picture F.A. Vasiliev depicted a meadow after rain. It's called "Wet Meadow". The canvas was painted in one thousand eight hundred and seventy-two. It won second place in a competition organized by the Society for the Encouragement of Artists. The painting was not painted from life. The artist drew it from memory and from several sketches made earlier in different places.
There are no large-scale objects in the picture, bright colors. It depicts a meadow washed by rain, several trees on the right, a creek with marshy banks in the center and a slope on the left. But the picture is not static. Clouds running across the sky, going into the distance, trees bending from the wind, ripples on the water show the continuous movement occurring in nature. This is a struggle between the elements. It is especially visible in the sky, which occupies most paintings.
The sky is divided into two parts. One is bright, there the sun is already coming into its own, breaking through the clouds still filled with moisture. The other part is dark, almost black. Clouds dominate there, gloomy and thunderous. They carry their waters further to pour out as rain over the forest visible in the distance. The sky is reflected in the water, which is also dark on one side and light on the other.
Darkness follows the clouds. Therefore, the foreground of the picture is already illuminated by the bright rays of the sun. The road and the grass, refreshed by the rain, are clearly visible. And in the depths everything is dark. Sky and earth merge into one impenetrable blackness. But the canvas does not reek of gloom. On the contrary, it amazes life-affirming force. The darkness goes away and is replaced by light again.
The work of F. A. Vasiliev was highly appreciated by his contemporaries. I.N. Kramskoy was shocked. He believed that this work was worthy of first prize. But the author of the picture by that time was only twenty-two years old. Unfortunately, the artist was not given the opportunity to live a long, fruitful life. But what he managed to do put him on a par with such masters of painting as I.I. Shishkin, I.E. Repin and many others.

Wet meadow.
At first glance, the painting “Wet Meadow”, with its familiarity and simplicity of motif, attracts any viewer. In the depths of the wide space, two spreading trees rise, and in the distance, from under the retreating menacing clouds, a small strip of sky appears. Ahead, along the niche, stretches a steep slope, covered with soft and wet green grass. In the foreground - almost in the center of the picture - through black thunderclouds, the warm sun is trying to be reflected in a swampy pool.
The storm passes, but the sky continues to seethe and boil. The shaggy gray clouds swirl and collide with mighty force. Somewhere in the distance, thunder can be heard, reflected in endless space. The picture is full of movement, everything around here breathes and lives: trees bending under strong blows of the wind, water covered with ripples, and the sky. The sky, imbued with a typically Vasilyevsky mood, is contrasted with ominous clouds that continue to overthrow, far from the viewer, big flow rain on the forest visible from afar.
The sky, in the paintings of Fyodor Vasiliev, invariably plays a significant role, and in “Wet Meadow” it is perhaps the key means, it expresses the artist’s poetic thought. A warm sparkling opening high in the clouds above a green meadow, reflected in the water and shining on the grass, wages war with large and cold black clouds, casting a dark shadow on the wet ground.
As if in contrast to the tense existence of the sky, the rest of the picture is quite simple. The lines of her drawing are calmer and softer. Every detail of the landscape is a variation of the main idea, where all the details are so dissolved as a whole that you recognize them only upon careful examination.

The phenomenon of “artistic origin” of the landscape painter Fyodor Aleksandrovich Vasiliev has always continued and continues to amaze everyone who in one way or another comes into contact with his work. Art critic L.I. Iovleva notes that he appeared on the horizon of Russian art of the 1860s at the age of eighteen, almost as a self-taught boy. But somehow unexpectedly, almost suddenly, he became an equal among the leading artists of that time. On “equal terms” he participated with them in exhibitions, on “equal terms” he won competitions and in two or three years achieved such professional successes that others took years, and sometimes a whole life, to achieve.

Fedor Vasiliev. Wet meadow

The cheerful, witty, temperamental young man F. Vasiliev, as he appears from the pages of the memoirs of I. E. Repin and I. Kramskoy, was sick with an incurable disease at that time - consumption. He went to Crimea and lived in Yalta for the last two years.

On the streets of Yalta, almonds were falling, roses were blooming, the “Judas tree” was dressed in a lush, dense pink outfit, magnolias were blooming, large clusters of wisteria were hanging from flexible lashes-branches. But the artist was possessed by an irresistible craving for his native land, for the discreet charm of Russian nature.

In Yalta, F. Vasiliev spent a long time depicting old, familiar and painfully dear northern motifs to his heart. Among the album drawings, where he made pencil sketches of the Crimean nature that was new to him, there are landscapes of central Russia sketched from his memories.

In Crimea, F. Vasiliev also painted the painting “Wet Meadow”, which became one of the masterpieces of Russian landscape painting. In it he wanted to express his feelings, all his love - everything that preserves the memory of his heart. There will be no mighty mountains, no cypress trees, no lush southern flowers, no azure sea - just a rain-washed wet meadow under a huge sky, a few trees in the distance and the shadows of wind-driven clouds running across the wet grass.

The storm is leaving, but the sky is still boiling and seething. With menacing haste, shaggy clouds rush and collide, peals of thunder can still be heard - everything in the picture is full of movement, everything lives and breathes: trees bending under the gusts of wind, and rippling water, and the sky... Even especially the sky, imbued with a typically Vasilyevsky mood , which is contrasted on the canvas with ominous clouds still pouring streams of rain onto the forest visible in the distance.

The sky always plays a significant role in F. Vasiliev’s paintings, and in “Wet Meadow” it is perhaps the main means of expressing the artist’s poetic thought. A sparkling warm opening in the clouds, reflected in the water and supported by reflections on the ground, fights against huge dark and cold clouds and shadows running along the ground.

As if in contrast to the intense life of the sky, the rest of the landscape is extremely simple and its drawing lines are softer and calmer. Each detail of the picture (and there are many of them on this canvas) is a variation of the main theme, but all the details are so dissolved as a whole that you can recognize them only with a very careful examination.

At first glance, “Wet Meadow” attracts the viewer with its simplicity and familiarity of the motif. In the depths of a wide depression, two spreading trees rise. Far behind them, in the gray haze of the forest, a strip of sky appears. A steep slope stretches along the lowland, and in front - almost in the center - a swampy backwater with marshy banks glistens. That, in fact, is all that is depicted on the canvas by F. Vasiliev. But his contemporaries saw him in this picture as more than even a generalized image of the artist’s native northern nature.

The painting captivates the viewer with the extraordinary depth of the inspired landscape, the immediacy of the feelings and moods embedded in it. F. Vasiliev never presents nature as “cold, eternal and indifferent.” He constantly searched for harmony and purity in it, the artist warmed and spiritualized it with a deeply poetic feeling, and it was in his paintings that the intimately lyrical, sad and melancholy theme that froze with his death was first heard. The moods of struggle and resistance expressed in “Wet Meadow” - on the one hand, and on the other - sadness and melancholy captivate and involuntarily force one to return to the sad biography of its 22-year-old author.

The composition of "Wet Meadow" is simple and relaxed, and at the same time it is difficult to imagine a more thoughtful and monumental work. In the picture it is easy to distinguish the compositional center to which the main lines of the landscape converge - the outlines of a hillside, the banks of a creek, paths, the boundaries of light and shadow in a meadow, a strip of forest. The visual center that organizes the whole picture is the dark silhouette of two mighty trees. F. Vasiliev shifted it to the right of the geometric center, and that is why the picture does not look static.

The space in “Wet Meadow” unfolds surprisingly smoothly and boldly. The sky with its boiling and seething, with its play of light and its cosmic infinity is depicted consummate master and a poet of the sky, as the artist F. Vasiliev was considered. And at the same time, each bush of grass in the foreground reproduces with botanical accuracy the vegetation of central Russia.

“Wet Meadow” was submitted to the competition of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists in St. Petersburg in 1872 and received second prize (the first was awarded to I. Shishkin’s painting “Pine Forest”). Both artists had much in common in their attitude to nature and art. Both of them were children of the land they sang; both were closely connected with her, knew her with all her secrets and therefore knew how to see and so reverently convey her beauty.

When the head of the Itinerants, I. Kramskoy, saw F. Vasiliev’s “Wet Meadow,” he was shocked. And the clean spring greenery, and the flying light, and the silent breeze that rippled the water in the overgrown riverbed, and the invisible drops of rain on the wet foliage of the trees - everything spoke of an extraordinary artist and sensitive to “the noise and music of nature.”

“One Hundred Great Paintings” by N. A. Ionin, Veche Publishing House, 2002

Fedor Alexandrovich Vasiliev (10 (22) February 1850, Gatchina, Russian empire- September 24, 1873, Yalta) - Russian landscape painter.

It, like many other works of the painter, depicts nature.

If you are asked to write an essay on the painting “Wet Meadow,” be attentive to the atmosphere of the painting and the details when describing it.

The first glance at the picture evokes mixed, contradictory feelings. A plain opens before the viewer, illuminated by timid morning rays sun. As soon as I passed, it was clear from the quickly receding gloomy clouds. Nature rejoices at the new day and the warmth of the sun no less than the recent downpour.

Color scheme of the painting

The painting "Wet Meadow" by Vasiliev was painted in a cold and warm colors simultaneously. This contrast is created by the blue and ultramarine shades of the clouds on the right, and the warm yellow and beige clouds on the left. It was no coincidence that the artist used this technique: he wanted to show a sudden change in weather, which is rarely observed in nature. The disappearance of the clouds and the appearance of the sun is a truly wonderful moment that surprises and delights at the same time.

The lower part of the picture - the meadow and trees on the plain - is made in warm colors.

Composition

An essay on the painting “Wet Meadow” aims to understand the composition and meaning of the painting. Despite the fact that the work is called “Wet Meadow,” most of it is occupied by the sky. Vasiliev depicted this in order to enhance the effect of the sky hanging over the viewer, the impression of a retreating thunderstorm. The painting “Wet Meadow” is dynamic, which is natural for depicting nature. In it, the movement is directed from left to right: the direction of the puddle, the huge light cloud, the hill and the group of plants in the foreground tell us this. Thanks to the “principle of the golden ratio,” the eye wanders around the picture, taking in all the details. However, every viewer will pay attention to the lonely tree in the right edge of the canvas. This object is located in the semantic center of the picture so as to attract attention.

Essay on the painting “Wet Meadow”: foreground

The meadow seems completely flat compared to the sky. Fine grass and puddle water literally absorbed the surroundings. The greenery has drunk after a heavy downpour and is simply going wild, enjoying the sun. Thin roots seem to rise from the ground, and tiny flowers glow.

The illuminated puddle goes into the distance and gets lost in the thick grass. The water in it overflows different colors: from greenish and ocher to purple, like the sky itself. The surface of the water seems flawless, but you can see barely noticeable ripples. This detail allows you to distinguish water from sky. At the very edge of the puddle, in the foreground, we see small bubbles - all that remains from the little toad jumping into the pond a few seconds ago.

Light flowers and tiny leaves are painted by the artist so carefully and painstakingly that they create a feeling of warmth. Bluish, violet, yellow small flowers They come out and then hide again among the plants. Light and shadow are clearly visible: there are few halftones in the foreground. Contrast gives the picture brightness and expressiveness.

An essay based on the painting “Wet Meadow” allows you to fantasize. For example, on the right there is a dark shadow spread on the ground and we do not see what is casting it. We can assume that this is a huge tree that was left behind by the artist. Or perhaps it's one of those heavy rain clouds that's drifting away.

Background

Near the tree there are several low bushes, but they are not depicted in such detail and are relegated to the background. The steppe expanses behind the tree are painted much paler than main object paintings. In the distance you can see the horizon lost in the morning fog. It makes you wonder: what is there ahead? This will remain a mystery...

Description of the painting “Wet meadow” - best task for the romantic dreamer. There is nothing better than imagining how the artist felt while drawing each detail, and what meaning he wanted to convey to the audience.

Looking at this picture, I could not take my eyes off for a long time.
I was struck by the beauty and recognition of the landscape of Russian nature.
It seems that just recently, or maybe a moment ago, a thunderstorm thundered, but now it’s quiet.
We see rain pouring somewhere on the horizon.
And it was there, it seemed to me that lightning flashes from time to time, and peals of thunder can be heard from there.
Foreground paintings without rain, although we see gloomy clouds, the sun is noticeably trying to break through them.
We see the reflection of its rays in the creek.
The sun tries to softly illuminate everything around, and as if drops of dew begin to sparkle in the clearing.

It seemed to me that the artist sought to depict in his landscape everything moving or in motion.
Somewhere in the distance you can see how the wind sways the branches of trees, you can see how the grass sways and it seems that the clouds mixed with clouds are moving with the wind.
It seemed to me that the sky was depicted especially accurately and even expressively; it was probably not for nothing that the artist paid so much attention to it, devoting half of the canvas to the image of the sky.
Vasiliev managed to convey the contrast very beautifully by depicting dark, thick clouds, with gaps of sunlight, blue sky.
It seemed to me that the storm had not yet completely subsided, it had just begun to fade, and nature seemed to rejoice at this phenomenon and began to bloom and smile with gratitude.

Vasiliev’s paintings very often convey to us a lot of emotions, and I could not stay away.
I was not only interested in this work, but also impressed.
It even seemed to me that the main idea of ​​this landscape or the idea that the artist wanted to convey to us is the struggle of nature with inclement weather, the ability to withstand adversity and storms no matter what.
I also liked this work because it made me think about many topics, not only those related to surrounding nature, but also the ability to withstand difficulties.