The painting Smithy is one of the most successful canvases of Rozanova’s Neo-Primitivist period.

Olga Rozanova was an artist of enormous talent, but of very inconsistent and spontaneous temperament. In Smithy, the artist’s temperament finds adequate expression both in the motif and in the expressive forms used. Rozanova created a composition in which every detail literally oozes energy, filled with the life force.