The collection of the Engels Museum of Local Lore houses the painting “The Volga Reaches” by Yakov Yakovlevich Weber.

This canvas, created in 1935, was an artist’s copy of his large early painting called “Barges on the Volga” which he painted in 1908. It was transferred to the Engels Museum of Local Lore in the second half of the 1990s by the artist Pavel Ivanovich Zorya. The painting “Barges on the Volga” is currently housed in the collection of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. Another canvas with the same motif, but smaller in size, is the 1935 “Volga. Tugboat with Barges”. It is part of the collections of the Cheboksary State Art Museum and was handed over to the museum in 1958, while Yakov Weber was still alive. Thus, to date, three versions of the painting with this subject are known.

The artist uses his favorite compositional technique: the high horizon makes it possible to fully convey the breadth of the Volga reaches, revealing the perspective and great depth of space. The viewer sees the boundless river surface disturbed by the wind. In the distant background, large and small work vessels rest against the horizon, balancing the clouds fleeing into the distance with their silhouettes. The artist knows the structure of river vessels and depicts it in detail: wide, flat-bottomed, with masts or a smoking chimney. As always, the main subject of Weber’s landscapes is the Volga — the main river waterway of Russia. The barges on the canvas are not just vessels that fit well into the landscape, their presence also testifies to the continuing great historical and economic importance of the Volga for the country at the turn of the 20th century. It is not without reason that the Volga attracted the attention of many artists, writers and poets who portrayed the great Russian river in their works.

The painting “The Volga Reaches” was displayed at the art exhibition of the Central Museum of the Volga German ASSR in the section of socialist construction in 1933, and was also reproduced in the newspaper Neues Leben in 1980 with the title “Volga”.