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. Already terminally ill, Vasilyev spent his last two years in the Crimea. The infinite sea fascinated the painter with its lyricism and the beauty of surf waves. It was there that he conceived a large painting, Surf Waves, which in the end remained unfinished. The picture is now displayed in the Tretyakov Gallery.
Upon choosing a complicated light-driven motif for his future picture, the painter made a multitude of preparatory studies and pencil drawings from nature. The study Surf in Yalt was one of them. There is only the sea and the sky in the picture. Untiring and always novel waves with foamed crests keep breaking on a shore. In this small study depicting sea surf, the painter was able to portray the fickle nature of light and colour. It is hard to determine even the prevailing colour of the waves, rising and falling against the shore.
‘The whitish wave crests create the feeling of foamy illuminated splashes of water. This colour unexpectedly includes the greenish emerald and olive colours, just as indefinite in the shades of the painting, surprisingly dynamic in techniques, catching the rhythms of the movement’. (F.S.Maltseva). The sky is painted surprisingly skilfully in the play of various shades. Either the emerald blue of the sea is reflected in the sky, or the yellow and blue of the sky give their colours to the waves crushing the shore. I.N. Kramskoy, who came to Yalta to visit Vasilyev, later wrote: ‘You know, frankly speaking, I oftentimes remember my stay in the Crimea, like a dream… I still remember the lifelike waves, breakers that keep curling and roaring, rascals, and Fyodor Aleksandrovich that keeps drawing and trying to understand the laws of physics…’
Looking at the studies of this genius painter, it is easy to imagine what beautiful pictures he would have created. Fyodor Vasilyev died at the age of twenty three in the prime of his talent, he left real masterpieces of landscape painting behind. ‘Being young, strong, and only for five years existing as an artist that rose to eminence, he revealed the living sky, the moist, light and moving sky and those delights of the landscape, which he showed in only a hundred of his pictures’. (N.N.Ge).
