Alexander Semyonovich Yegornov was a painter and watercolorist. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts under Mikhail Konstantinovich Klodt. The artist’s works are kept in the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum and other collections.
The realistic plein-air landscape of the Peredvizhniki group reached its highest peak at the end of the 19th century. It also influenced academic landscape painters, who started searching for new approaches to the depiction of Russian nature, associated with new discoveries and methods of Impressionist artists.
The painting “Landscape with Cows” belongs to the late period in Alexander Yegornov’s career. The artist traveled extensively through Russia in search of new subjects and inspiration. The landscape combines a simple pictorial motif with an academically arranged structure of the composition. The genre subject is a herd at pasture, which is an element often found in Russian landscapes of the 19th century; it plays a special role in the general interpretation of nature, which is shown as an indispensable part of people’s lives. The absent distant view is also part of this interpretation.
The “Landscape with Cows” captures the artist’s favorite motif — the road. In the painting, it is not endowed with a romantic meaning, simply being a country road leading from the village to the pasture. The summer air is imbued with harmony and peace, which cannot be disturbed even by the grayish clouds in the sky. The static nature of the composition is emphasized by a lonely female figure standing by the hedge.
In depicting the everyday motif of village life, the artist broke from the detailing that was characteristic of his earlier works and instead tried to make the image simpler, in both narrative and execution. This landscape is notable for its simplified manner of painting and the color palette based on the plein-air achievements of that time. Using various shades of green and painting in short brush strokes, the artist conveyed the harmony existing between man and nature. The rural landscape by Alexander Yegornov is one of the paintings where the creative tasks are solved by conveying the beauty of Russian nature. By avoiding anything spectacular or pompous, the artist created an image of nature, imbued with purity and tranquility.
