On seeing works by 19-year-old Fyodor Aleksandrovich, artist Ilya Repin acknowledged that he ‘has never seen clouds being so marvellously shaped and well illuminated’. Fyodor Valilyev was referred to by his painter-friends as a ‘wonder boy’, a ‘phenomenal young man’ for his exceptional talent for painting. Amazing and talented painter Fyodor Vasilyev lived a short life and left only a few paintings behind. But Russian art can hardly be imagined without him.
Some of his contemporaries believed that everything came easily to him, that he paints effortlessly. But in a letter to Pavel Tretyakov, the young painter admitted: ‘I paint every picture in blood and sweat rather than oils’. His exceptional talent was already seen in his early pieces, for example, in the picture Landscape. Pargolovo, painted in 1868. At that time he often turned to country scenes. Its redeeming feature is, first of all, the modesty and simplicity of the scene chosen by the painter. A warm summer day, a rural road with an plain farm house next to it, trees with exuberant foliage, growing over the bank of a small river, with birds flying over its mirror-like surface. Locals do their daily routines and a herd of cattle peacefully grazes in the shade of the trees. In his landscapes, people make a whole with nature, where their daily lives run so unpretentiously.
The narrative development of the theme and the subtle portrayal of details are inherent in this picture. A blurred corn colour smoothly fills the entire landscape, with this warm pink and corn colouring of the picture making its mundane motif look heart-warming and cordial. Such composition of a landscape is characteristic of the painter’s early pieces. The road he paints directs the movement to the centre of the picture, where there is a group of trees hiding in the distance. Vasilyev enriches his composition with details that gradually unfold its content.
Perking up the landscape with genre motifs is characteristic of many of his works. F.S. Maltseva, a scholar of Vasilyev’s oeurvre wrote: ‘Upon choosing his genre motif, he is interested in this motif being blended with the landscape, its scenic composition and unfolding nature rather than with the development of the narrated action’.
