The development of Vasilyev’s talent was stopped short by his early death. At the age of twenty-three, he died of tuberculosis. Despite the short creative life, he painted a lot and became an innovator in the landscape genre. “He was meant to bring to the Russian landscape what it lacked: poetry and natural drawing, ” wrote the artist Ivan Kramskoy. According to Kramskoy, everything in Vasilyev”s emotional and dramatic paintings “spoke of the artist who was unusually sensitive to the music and noise of nature”.

Following the traditions of Venetsianov and Savrasov, the artist’s goal for his own paintings was ‘the simpler, the more artistic’. In his works, he reflected the characteristic features of the Russian landscape, and the typical living conditions of peasants. Even in his early landscapes, the depiction of the motherland’s nature possessed a unique depth of feelings, which is also seen in a small-scale work held in the Vrubel Museum. The landscape is characteristic of the artist’s work: it is full of love for the motherland, and a sense of tenderness for Russian nature.

Vasilyev used to work in the open air with his teacher, artist Ivan Shishkin. In the summer of 1868, they lived and worked near the town of Krasnoye Selo next to Saint Petersburg. Perhaps that is where the work depicting peasants with a boat on the sandy shore was created. When working on this landscape, the artist was eighteen years old. Still under the influence of his older collegues, young Vasilyev carefully worked out the details of the wretched village. He showed interest in nature’s life, noticing the beauty in the simple and ordinary: the blue sky reflected in the water puddles on the road after rain, the ray of sunlight breaking through heavy clouds. Shining colors, contrasts of radiant light and shadows fill the landscape with a poetic mood.