However, the painting from the Radishchev Museum does not reproduce any part of the finished work. It is regarded as a separate work, which gives an idea of the technique of the master.

Almost half of the painting is occupied with the view of the sky. The artist depicted thick gray clouds that are reflected from the surface of the water. On a narrow strip of the shore there sits a man in a sailor’s uniform. He looks at the ship, sailing along the wide canal.

This figure is a hint at the author himself. By his first education, the painter was a sailor. He graduated from the Sea Cadet Corps and participated in ship expeditions. After that, he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, but never forgot about his first profession. In 1863 when Bogolyubov was already a sought-after and well-known artist, he published his memoirs under the title Notes of a Sailor-Artist.

St. Petersburg Sea Canal is attributed to the late period in the artist’s work. At that time, the artist’s color palette was dominated by restrained and cold colors. In this picture, he used muted brown, gray, blue and sienna shades. This set of colors creates a feeling of slight sadness, while little inclusions of red focus attention on the chimney of the ship, the roof of the building on the shore and the figure of the sailor.

From the early 1870s, Bogolyubov lived in France, but almost every summer he came to his homeland. In 1885, he opened the first public art museum in a province of Russia. The idea occurred to the artist as early as in the 1850s, when he saw similar institutions while traveling in Europe. The museum was named after the artist’s beloved grandfather, poet and writer Alexander Radishchev.

Bogolyubov bequeathed his collection of paintings to the Radishchev Museum. The sketch was received in 1897 after the artist’s death.