Troika: Apprentices Fetching Water
Vasily Perov (1834 to 1882) · 1866
Three children strain against the ropes of a sledge loaded with a huge barrel of water, dragging it up a frozen Moscow street at dusk. A troika is a team of three horses, and the title is a cruel joke: these apprentices have taken the place of animals. Their faces are blue with cold, the girl in the middle is exhausted, and a man behind pushes the barrel while a dog runs alongside. Water spills from the barrel and freezes on the wood. Behind them rises the monastery wall, indifferent.
Perov was the leading painter of social conscience in Russia in the eighteen sixties, and here he lets the composition do the arguing. The children are set against the dark wall so that their pale faces catch the last light, and the slope of the street makes every step look heavier. He painted the boy on the left from a real peasant child named Vasya, whose mother reluctantly agreed to let him sit. When she came to Perov's studio years later to tell him the boy had died, and asked to see the picture, the painter took her to the Tretyakov, where she fell to her knees in front of it.
Pavel Tretyakov bought Troika in eighteen sixty six, one of his early purchases, and Perov later painted a separate portrait of the dead boy for the mother. The picture has never lost its force. Look at the hands of the children, wrapped in rags, and at the small icon-like calm of the girl's face, and you will understand why generations of Russians have stood in front of it in silence.
Did You Know? The mother of the boy who posed for the picture came to see it after his death and knelt in front of it in the gallery.
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