The exhibition of the Astrakhan Art Gallery named after Pavel Mikhailovich Dogadin presents the painting “Oxen Pulling a Plow” by the Austrian artist Franz Tomashu. The canvas combines an animal portrait and a genre scene depicted against the background of an expanded landscape. The oxen pull a plow, followed by a peasant in a white shirt. In the distance is a field, to the right is a church and white village houses.
In Western European painting, farm animals often became the central elements of genre scenes. Gradually, images of animals began losing their symbolic meanings.
The artist painted the scene in a free and broad manner. The prevailing ocher tones are consonant with the colors of European autumn. The artist worked especially carefully on the foreground of the painting, focusing on depicting the oxen. The plowman’s clean white shirt seems to echo the beautiful view of healthy and strong animals. The man in Tomashu’s painting is in tune with the surrounding nature, plants and animals. But the artist focused more on the animals than the peasant following them: he meticulously painted the oxen, emphasizing their strength and power, virtue and obedience to the will of man expressed in their eyes.
The backdrop for this genre scene is an autumnal landscape in Austria-Hungary, featuring rust-colored woodlands, expansive colorful fields that are cut in strips like a rug, and a small, cozy village with red tiled roofs in the distance. A narrative and epic element is added by the large, swirling clouds hovering over the fields. Franz Tomashu used light and dark colors to create a striking contrast, as well as textured, broad manner of applying brush strokes to paint the foreground.
