The Tretyakov Gallery Masterworks

The first volume of a six-part survey of the State Tretyakov Gallery gathers 800 works of Russian landscape by 152 artists, from the 1750s to the 1930s.



This is the century in which Russian landscape found its own subject. Ivan Shishkin counts every needle of a pine forest; Isaac Levitan turns a bend in the Volga into a statement about time; Ivan Aivazovsky makes the sea behave like an orchestra; Alexei Savrasov finds the whole of spring in the noise of rooks over a village church. Beside them stand the quieter hands — Fyodor Vasilyev, dead at twenty-three; Vasily Polenov in his overgrown gardens; Apollinary Vasnetsov walking the Urals and the outskirts of Moscow. And about one plate in eight was painted abroad — Alexei Bogolyubov on the Normandy coast, Alexander Ivanov in the Bay of Naples, Sylvester Shchedrin at Sorrento: Russian eyes on southern light.



Forests, rivers, seashores, steppe and snow, the same places in four seasons and at every hour of the day. Large reproductions, each with its painter, title and date.



Reproduced from the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery. This edition is published by Aeneas Press and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Gallery.