In his picture A Collective Farm Cattle Herd of 1947, artist Vasily Yakovlev painted the even tenor of post-war life. On the left and right sides of the foreground there are milkmaids surrounded by the wide spread of the Central Russian nature. The abundance of details that fill the images of plants and animals are illustrative of the painter’s almost naturalistic observation skills. In 1949, for this painting the artist was awarded the Stalin Prize, the highest Soviet state award of that time.
A Collective Farm Cattle Herd
Creation period
1947
Dimensions
250x300 cm
Technique
Oil on canvas
Collection
Exhibition
1
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Vasily Yakovlev
A Collective Farm Cattle Herd
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Yakovlev was born to a rich merchant family in 1893. In 1911, he entered the Physics and Mathematics Department of the Moscow State University, at the same time he attended the Art Studio of painter Vasily Meshkov. After graduation from the Studio, Yakovlev continued his education in the Moscow School of Fine Arts, Sculpture and Architecture, where his teachers were the painter and stage designer Konstantin Korovin, the Itinerant Abram Arkhipov, and others. He finished the School in 1918 and straight away started teaching.
Yakovlev made a career of a statutory Soviet painter: he was a restoration artist of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, a teacher in the largest universities, was made a People’s Artist of the Russian Federation and was elected a member of the Academy of Arts. Therefore, among his paintings there are many works of socialist realism, like his painting on an industrial subject The Power Station of 1922 or the monumental genre painting Gold Miners are Writing a Letter to Comrade Stalin completed in 1937.
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The artist often painted gala decorative still-life paintings designed for decoration of public buildings. Those works are always abundant: lush bouquets, large ripe vegetables, fowl and fish.
In the above works the painter imitated Dutch Masters of the 17th century: for example, Abraham van Beyerene had painted his Still-Life with Fish in the same manner. In 1939 Yakovlev was appointed the Chief Artist of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, the place that was later renamed as the All-Union Exhibition of Economic Achievements.
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Abraham van Beyerene, Still-Life with Fish, 1650 -1670s. Source: commons.wikimedia.org
During the World War II the painter switched over to patriotic subjects and more than once visited the front line, where he painted servicemen from life. In 1942 he painted The Portrait of Hero of the Soviet Union, Major-General I.V. Panfilov, and in 1944, the stately Portrait of Marshal Zhukov. For his war-time paintings Yakovlev was awarded his first Stalin Prize.
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Orenburg Regional Museum of Fine Arts
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A Collective Farm Cattle Herd
Creation period
1947
Dimensions
250x300 cm
Technique
Oil on canvas
Collection
Exhibition
1
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