The painter Anatoly Klimov was born in 1933 at the Volovo station of the Tula region. He began to paint at an early age — this passion was passed on to him by his father, who was a railway engineer and an amateur artist. When Klimov graduated from school, he successfully passed the entrance exams to the forestry technical school, but did not go there, and preferred to study art. In 1949 he entered the Yelets Art College.
Klimov was a student of the expressionist artist Viktor Sorokin, who moved from Moscow to Yelets in searching for creative freedom. He believed that the purpose of art is to raise the spirit of people, and passed this idea on to his students. After graduation, Klimov stayed in Yelets, and it became his hometown. He worked as a teacher at the school for working youth and at the Yelets State Art College named after T.N. Khrennikov.
In the 1950s, Klimov began exhibition activities — he participated in regional, local and republican exhibitions. His works are kept in the Lipetsk Regional and Yeletsk Local History Museums, the Regional Art Museum, the Volovo Art and History Museum (Tula Region), as well as in private collections in Russia, Europe and the USA.
Klimov’s favorite technique is watercolor, and the most frequent motif of his work is the landscapes of old Yelets. He painted the streets of the town, including Staromoskovskaya (now Mayakovsky Street), where the Khrennikovs' house was located.
In his painting Sunny Day (1985), the artist captured the house of the Khrennikov family long before the building became a museum. Earlier, poplars grew along the red facade, under which the future composer played. On the right, Klimov depicted a part of a two-story merchant’s mansion, in which a kindergarten was located during the Soviet era.
The painter conveyed the atmosphere of a small petty bourgeois town — one- and two-story wooden houses that were buried in the greenery of gardens and front gardens, bright facades and shutters, a high blue sky with curly clouds.
Klimov presented the painting ‘Sunny Day’ to Tikhon Khrennikov, and then the composer donated it to the collection of the house-museum.
