At the River Crossing is one of the first paintings in the series of Volga landscapes by Baqi Urmanche. He painted it in Kazan during the happy years of his artistic prime. By that moment, the artist had tried a lot of jobs: he had worked at a factory worker at the Urals, as a miner in Donets coalfields, as a school inspector in Udmurtia, as a soldier in tsar’s army. The eldest son in a large family, he believed that he had to financially support his younger brothers and sisters and did his best to earn a living.

However, his desire to become an artist overcame all the obstacles. After the Revolution, he enrolled in the Kazan Free Art Studios, and later, went to Moscow to study in the Higher Art and Technical Studios (Vkhutemas) of Moscow. After returning to Kazan at the second half of the 1920s, he started a lot of activities: began teaching in an art college, became director of the art department of the House of Tatar Culture, started making illustrations and, certainly, continued painting. As Urmanche remembered, in those years he was “passionately involved in creative work and teaching, devoting himself totally to his favorite occupation”.

In those years, life gave Urmanche so much that he did not limit himself to certain composition schemes, painted freely and confidently, in a manner close to impressionism. The painting At the River Crossing shows all the freshness of his new and unbiased vision. However, he organizes the space in a rather complicated way: the vertical rhythm of human figures is broken by the diagonal of the rowboat at the foreground and the horizontal line of the far bank. All that gives the necessary depth to the painting.

The feeling of a hot summer day at the river is conveyed very realistically thanks to the work with the light and the atmosphere: the objects and the human figures are bathed in sunlight and wrapped in haze. Most characters are with their backs to the spectator, and the others’ faces are not painted in detail but only lightly traced. However, the very movements and gestures of the characters unveil their individual features. The characters in the foreground are divided into two groups. On the left, we can see village dwellers: a woman wearing traditional clothes and a boy, and on the right, a man and a woman in urban clothes are talking with animation.