In his painting Isady Vistas the artist Viktor Ivanov depicted a view of the Oka River near the village of Isady in the Ryazan region, where the artist often stayed and worked.

Despite the small size of the canvas, this landscape of Central Russia appears monumental and grand. The Oka River meanders amid hills and recedes smoothly in the distance. The sunlight is breaking through the clouds, dim and slightly muted, as it is at dusk. Horses are grazing along the riverbanks.

The composition of the painting is structured horizontally, with the canvas split by the borderline between the ground and the sky. It has several clear-cut and even bands: the bank in the foreground, hills, the river behind them, the background to the line of the horizon, and the varying tones of the sky. This is the technique characteristic of the so-called ‘severe style’ – the term introduced by the art critic Alexander Kamensky – which was quite popular in Soviet art between the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Paintings in the ‘severe style’ were laconic and generalized. The artists that painted in this manner ignored details and nuances. They employed precise and solid lines and often painted large areas with one and the same colour. It was an expressive artistic technique as large, brightly coloured areas easily attracted the viewer’s eye.

Masters of the severe style drew from the works of the artists of the 1920s-1930s such as Alexander Deineka, Georgy Nissky, Aristarkh Lentulov or Pyotr Konchalovsky. Viktor Ivanov was one of the better-known representatives of this movement.

Ivanov was born and grew up in Moscow and graduated from the Surikov Arts School in Moscow. However, his choice of the landscape theme was his mother’s native places, the Ryazan region. He had his studio in the village of Isady where he painted the nearby views.

Viktor Ivanov worked in other genres apart from landscapes, doing portraits or painting scenes of the village life.

In 2004, Ryazan opened a museum fully dedicated to the works by Viktor Ivanov. His paintings are to be found also in the Tretyakov Gallery, Russian Museum, Kiev Museum of Russian Art as well as in other collections of art. Since 1983, Ivanov’s self-portrait has been on display in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.