The collection of the Engels Museum of Local Lore includes the painting “Flood” — one of the best paintings by Yakov Yakovlevich Weber, Honored Artist of the Volga German ASSR, landscape painter, academic artist and teacher.
Yakov Weber was born in 1870 in the German colony of Goly Karamysh located in one of the picturesque areas of Saratov Governorate. Soon after Yakov was born, the Weber family moved to Rovnoe (Zelman). This is where the artist lived as a child and a young man. Sharing with his father all the burdens of peasant life, young Weber dreamed of becoming a real artist. In 1892, already married, Yakov Weber decided to take a job as a copyist in the Radishchev Art Museum in Saratov. During this period the artist became close to the most prominent representatives of the Saratov artistic elite: Vasily Konovalov and Viktor Borisov-Musatov. Weber’s friendship with the outstanding artists strengthened his desire to study and devote his life to fine arts.
The painting “Flood” is known to be very dear to Yakov Weber. His canvas depicts the natural disaster as a routine aspect of life in Pokrovsk, the diverse manifestations of nature, rather than a disaster. The water, occupying the entire foreground of the painting, is depicted with amazing realism. As Ivan Aivazovsky excelled in portraying the sea, Weber masterfully conveyed the river surface. The silhouettes of two unassuming wooden structures in the center of the composition against the blue sky with their reflection in the water look majestic and indestructible. The precisely balanced composition and silver-blue color scheme convey the atmosphere of a clear, windless spring day.
“Flood” was presented at the Republican Exhibition
in 1927 and received special mention in the local press. The painter was called
a great master of “depicting water and the Volga landscape”:
