The Rooks Have Returned
Alexei Savrasov (1830 to 1897) · 1871
A small canvas, and at first sight nothing much is happening. A few crooked birch trees stand in melting snow at the edge of a village, a wooden fence leans, a church with a tent-shaped bell tower rises behind, and in the branches a flock of rooks is busy building nests. The sky is grey and damp. Yet this modest scene is one of the best loved paintings in Russian art, because it captures the exact moment when winter turns into spring, the moment every Russian waits for.
Savrasov painted the study for it in March eighteen seventy one in the village of Molvitino, in the Kostroma region, and finished the picture in his Moscow studio. Look at the snow: it is not white but blue, grey, brown and yellow, with puddles of meltwater reflecting the sky. The birches are painted with thin, nervous strokes, and the rooks are little more than dots, yet their movement fills the picture with life. Savrasov taught landscape at the Moscow School of Painting, where his pupil Isaac Levitan learned from him that a landscape could be a state of the soul rather than a view.
The painting was shown at the first exhibition of the Wanderers in eighteen seventy one, and Pavel Tretyakov bought it before the show opened. Critics said it was the only picture in the exhibition with a soul. Savrasov's later life was sad, marked by poverty and drink, and he repeated the composition many times to earn money, but the original hangs here. If you visit in early spring you may feel exactly what he felt.
Did You Know? Savrasov painted so many later versions of the rooks to pay his debts that the original became known simply as the one in the Tretyakov.
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