The painting ‘The Herd. On the Pasture’, created by Arkady Plastov, captured the view of his native village Prislonikha. The artist depicted a spacious field with a herd of cows of various color patterns. The heavily clouded sky spreads over the high horizon, and the foreground is occupied with the figure of a large bull.

Arkady Plastov had a penchant for country views with their meadows, hayfields, and cattle grazing. In his autobiography, he wrote about his other picture on a similar subject:

Plastov viewed preparatory studies as the most important stage of creating a painting. He insisted that a painter can truly reflect the idea only through observing real life:

Sometimes, it took him years to find the right composition, prepare the studies and choose the color scheme for one painting.

Plastov had firsthand knowledge of peasant labor, for there were periods in life when he worked in the fields together with his fellow villagers. After receiving a great education at the Stroganov Academy and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, the 24-year-old painter had to go back to his homeland because of the raging Revolution.

Back at home, the peasants gave him some land, and he reminisced, ‘I became a plowman, a peasant. <…> I have been through a lot of both bad and good things. I plowed, mowed, threshed, and did everything else the average middle-class peasant like me was supposed to do’.

When he was not working, he dedicated all his time to painting: he created studies, made sketches and planned the creation of an epic painting about peasant life.As soon as Plastov reestablished the connection with fellow painters from Moscow and showed them his works, he became a recognized artist. His painting ‘Haymaking’ received critical acclaim from Igor Grabar, Ilya Mashkov and Konstantin Yuon, and the painting ‘Spring’ with a naked woman dressing up a child near a banya (a steam bath) was nicknamed ‘the Northern Venus’. People loved Plastov’s canvases for their honesty, outstanding level of painting and deep perception of subject matter.