Biography from LewAllen Galleries at the Santa Fe Railyard:
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compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 Russian landscape painter Alexei Savrasov was born in Moscow in
1830. He specialized in landscapes while enrolled at the Moscow
School of Painting and Sculpture from 1838-1850, and is credited with
being the originator of the lyrical landscape style of painting in
Russia. Lyrical landscape painting “represented a turning back to
nature, giving commonplace subjects...a sense of poetry, “ in contrast
to the tired Romanticism of the academic painting that flooded Russia
during the latter half of the 19th century. In 1854, he was
awarded the title of Fellow of the Academy for his paintings Seashore in the Neighborhood of Oranienbaum and View of the Neighborhood of Oranienbaum.
Director
of the landscape studio at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture,
and Architecture from 1857-1882, Savrasov encouraged his students to
move outside, to work en plein air and to study nature at first hand.
Isaak Levitan, a disciple of Savrasov, once said of the master, that he
found “intimate, deeply affecting, features, which influence one’s soul
so much, in something most simple and ordinary.”
Stimulated by the French painters of the Barbizon School, Savrasov
eschewed the topical issues of academic history painting for the
unpretentious beauty of the Russian landscape. Themes of spring and
awakening, as seen in his most famous painting, The Rooks Have Returned, first exhibited in 1871, run through his oeuvre.
Savrasov
was a founding member of The Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions.
Also known as The Wanderers, the association convened in 1870 to
express their dissatisfaction with the Academy’s deep conservatism as
well as their desire to win some degree of freedom for practicing
artists. They met for 28 years and did much to reform the Academy’s
outdated practices. Despite his success, Savrasov displayed growing
dissatisfaction in both his personal life and artistic career.
He died in 1897 friendless and destitute. Only the doorkeeper of
the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpturing and Architecture and Pavel
Tretyakov, founder of the Tretyakov Gallery, were present at his
funeral.
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