The title of the work takes us back to the history of the creation and formation of the ‘Academic Dacha’ - the so-called ‘Russian Barbizon’. It was a place full of silence and tranquility, where a person could escape from the daily and exhausting bustle, cast cares aside and think of perennial.

Artists of different painting schools advocated a realistic landscape of their homeland with everyday motives. A characteristic technique was the creation of a study in the open air, followed by the completion of the work in the workshop. It is interesting that this work was preceded by another one with a similar plot, with the name ‘Dawn on the Msta River’ from 1961. It is now kept in the Memorial workshop of A.I. Kurnakov.

The landscape is painted in a realistic manner, in cold dark blue color. In the foreground, chunks of ice floes lie on the disheveled, frozen, dirty gray snow with sticking out reeds. The magpies, Andrey Ilyich’s beloved birds, perched on the remains of the fence. The overflowing stormy river with cold blue-black-purple water is painted with small strokes that convey movement and ripples. It seems that quite recently, spinning, clinging and colliding with each other, the ice floes passed here, breaking off sharp corners and crumbling. The flood of spring waters will gradually quieten, and the river will return to its former banks.

Further, in the background, lies the shore with remnants of snow and last year’s grasses sticking out here and there. Thin white-trunk birches kept some of last year’s yellow foliage. The trees darkening against the sky are shown in solid mass. A violet-lilac haze envelops the edge of the forest. Drifting clouds covered the sky with a misty silvery-purple shroud. But at the very edge of the horizon, a bright strip of sky, illuminated by the rays of the sun, breaks through. Warm pink reflections flare up more and more, illuminating the clouds, lie on the surface of the water, gleam on the stems of drooping and brown sedge. The feeling of a rainy day disappears. The sunrise in the picture sounds like a symbol of awakening nature.

Artist Andrey Ilyich Kurnakov is a master of still life. Being an avid mushroom picker, he often painted mushrooms. Andrei Ilyich recalled that once, he with his son and friends went to the Shablykinsky forest for honey mushrooms. “Again, I was the one who collected the mushrooms, because I was looking for the stumps on which they grow, the rest were looking for mushrooms - and did not find it”. This time, apparently, he was picking mushrooms somewhere in Znamenka, and, having come to the dacha, settled down to paint a picture at the wall of the house sheathed with wood - grayish-yellow boards are depicted by the artist in the background.

The artist called the work “Honey mushrooms”. Maybe because they are picturesquely scattered in the foreground on the left. He collected enough mushrooms, and they are very different. In a gray-blue metal bowl, together with honey mushrooms in the foreground, there are boletus, their red caps and strong legs cannot be confused with anything. To the right of the bowl lie a heap of white milk mushrooms; in a large wicker basket, you can see the milk mushrooms, which are popularly called nigella; you can see the cap of the boletus mushroom; and in the basket on the left with two handles, perhaps, goatsbeards. Long story short, there is something to fry and something to salt. The general coloring of the works is brownish-ocher, sunny. Wicker baskets are depicted so naturally that it seems that they can be taken by the handles and carried away.

But since the author draws our attention to honey mushrooms, let’s take a closer look at them. On a wooden table, reddish from direct sunlight, young mushrooms are scattered: beige round hats, thin grayish straight legs, an airy white skirt under the hat - well, just ballerinas, the artist depicts them so lovingly. The picture shows not just delicious gifts of the forest - it depicts the joy of life.

In front of a metal bowl lies a small knife with a wooden handle, and the wonderful lines from V.A. Soloukhin’s “The Third Hunt” are coming to mind:
’…With one movement of the knife you take off a dozen honey mushrooms at once. A dozen white spots pressed against each other remain about the stump. Another movement of the knife, and a dozen more mushrooms. With your left hand you hold their hats. They remain in the left hand like that, in a bush, without scattering into individual mushrooms. The knife creaks, cutting the dryish, resilient, springy pulp of a dozen mushrooms at once. Looking around, you see more and more stumps, overgrown with mushrooms, it seems that you will never collect all the mushrooms, but in the end, you cut off everything, and they fit into baskets, and the long winter later picks them up to the last mushroom. "