Henryk Siemiradzki painted the By the Water picture in 1895 in his Roman workshop. For it, he chose a plot that is considered to be traditional for his work: the era of antiquity. 

The artist was born in Kharkov, but spent most of his life in Rome. During his lifetime, he became famous both in Russia and Europe. Siemiradzki was elected an honorary member of the Berlin, Stockholm, Rome, Turin and Paris Academies of Arts. Contemporaries spoke of him as the last classic of the Russian art.

Siemiradzki was a representative of the late academism. The artists who belonged to this school considered modernity to be unworthy of depiction, and often turned to antique or evangelical subjects. In addition, they recognized the primacy of external forms, and conveyed the beauty of life through things and objects. Academicians competed with the Itineraries who considered the material aesthetics to be meaningless. For them, the emotions and mood of the picture were more important.

In the picture from the Radishchev Museum, Siemiradzki depicts a calm and quiet scene from real life. He does not seek to give psychological depth to the image, but captures the beauty of the world in accordance with the principles of academism. He uses a simple, concise and small-figure composition for his canvas, depicting only 4 people.

In the center of the picture is a young woman wearing a headscarf and rich jewelry. She is combing her daughter’s hair. Her son, who is holding a black ceramic vessel in front of him, is depicted in the left part of the canvas. Behind them, the maid is hanging up the laundry.

The picture is permeated with the sunlight of the warm summer day. Siemiradzki accurately reproduced the golden light on the stone floor, the shade of the grapes and the green stone near the reservoir. In that way, he sought to create a sense of reality of what was happening. To achieve this, the artist worked a lot in the open air (en plein air in French, literally outdoors). He watched the changes of the natural light and made sketches, and after that, in his workshop, he transferred his observations to the canvas.

The picture By the Water was received in the collection of the Radishchev Museum in 1926 from the State Museum Fund.