He lived only 48 years, filled with constant intense creative work and containing a lot. Vasily Perov is the most prominent representative of the Moscow painting school of the 19th century. He was one of the founders of the legendary Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions.

His work has several distinct periods, one of which belongs to a masterpiece of genre painting - the painting "Fisherman".

From the people and for the people

An illegitimate son of a bureaucrat, he even received a surname by the name of his godfather - Vasilyev, and a playful nickname, which later became a surname, came from a deacon who taught him to read and write. The boy struck him with his calligraphy ability. Vasily Perov knew the life of a simple person in all its manifestations - all its many hardships and small joys. To express them with all the power of the talent given by nature - he saw this as his main task.

The first known genre paintings of the young artist, written by him after 1860 (in the last year and immediately after graduating from the Academy of Arts), contained a critical or satirical assessment of certain phenomena of Russian life. For example, he denounces the hypocrisy, characteristic of a part of the Russian clergy, in the famous painting Tea Party in Mytishchi (1862).

Later, Vasily Perov thickens the general psychological tone of his paintings, in plots dedicated to the most defenseless part of the people, accusatory or tragic notes clearly sound. A striking example is the famous "Troika", written in 1866.

"Quiet passions"

At the next stage of life and work, Vasily Perov again changes the nature of his view, aimed at human life. He becomes more attentive and sensitive, able to see finer details. At this time, his famous, including writer's, portraits appear, and genre paintings are colored not by satire, but by good humor or light irony.

A number of canvases appear, traditionally combined into a single cycle, conditionally called “Quiet Passions”. It includes the super-popular Hunters at Rest (1871), The Birdman, written in 1870, The Dovecote (1874), and The Botanist (1874). Each of them tells about the simple and ordinary hobbies of an ordinary person.

These hobbies are different. Different in character and origin people inhabit But there is something in common: these canvases do not tell about actions accompanied by the expression of dramatic feelings - condemnation, pity or sympathy. The heroes of the paintings about “quiet passions” most often cause a smile full of humor or good irony. No less valuable is another feeling that unites these canvases - a feeling of unity with nature. With his pictorial skill, Perov emphasizes the enduring significance of these concepts. One of the main things that Vasily Perov wrote on this topic is The Fisherman (1871), which was also presented at the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873.

peaceful scene

On a rectangular canvas 91 centimeters high and 68 centimeters wide, the artist depicts a very peaceful scene. These are not the passionately accusatory, sharply social canvases that Vasily Perov became known to the enlightened Russian public. The painting "Fisherman" tells about human passions of a different kind. By all indications, this fisherman came to the river for his own pleasure, and not to get food, and he does not look like a person in dire need.

Judging by the attention with which the artist examines his hero, his fishing equipment, the surrounding landscape, it becomes clear that he considers such filling of human life no less important than the historical exploits of great heroes, or events that are in the nature of global dramas and tragedies.

Main character

All the attention of the viewer is drawn to the central character of the picture, which occupies the main space of the canvas. Then you can not even remember how many people are in the picture of Vasily Perov. In the background sits the second fisherman, busy with some important business of adjusting his equipment, looking like a harmonious part of a quiet early cool morning on a small pond.

The skill of the artist in conveying the psychology of the moment is impressive. The picture of Vasily Perov is a rich and fascinating story about a short moment that has absorbed a lot.

He is truly seized with excitement, carefully looking at the float, already leaning slightly, resting his hands on his knees and leaning forward, ready to instantly grab the bait to hook the prey. The surface of the water near the shore is calm, like a mirror. Obviously, the float had just swayed from the bite, and an experienced angler noticed the first waves diverging from it ...

Detail accuracy

It is not known whether Vasily Perov himself was fond of fishing. The painting "Fisherman" contains an entourage that speaks volumes. Before us is not a novice in this matter. He carefully prepared for the process. He has something to sit on, something to hide from the weather, something to eat. His rods are not just cut branches. They have special metal joints. At the ready a net - if there is a particularly large prey, and at the feet - a special fishing rod equipped with silver bells. There is no doubt - this is a professional!

One can only admire the skill with which the foreground of the picture is written. Perov appears as a painter who knows no difficulty in conveying the play of morning light on a clay jug, on boots polished to a shine or on a metal can with bait, and the accuracy of the details is worthy of a textbook on the history of fishing!

Man is part of nature

In the works of the earlier stages of creativity, Perov uses the natural environment as a means of forcing a dramatic feeling, and in The Fisherman, a person dissolves in the natural environment, being an integral part of it.

The best bite is at dawn! The first rays illuminated the top of the tree in the background, and the whole sky is already filled with milky light, but the remnants of the night still lie by the water, dissolving into the coming day along with the invigorating coolness...

Hours spent fishing are not included in the life span - isn't that what Vasily Perov wrote his picture about? “Fisherman” is a picture that endows the viewer with a bright, serene mood, so rarely seen in Russian classical painting of the 19th century.

Description of the painting by Perov “Fisherman”

The artist painted this picture in 1871.
It displays not an event, but an action.
The work is written in bright colors, which gives it realism.
Depicting the craft of catching fish, as it was done in those days and possibly still being done.
The artist himself loved fishing, and the whole process that concerns catching fish was familiar to him.
In general, Perov succeeded in the glory of the picture in which he depicted the life of ordinary people and their customs.

In the picture we see an elderly man who has surprise on his face.
A bright scarf tied around the fisherman's neck attracts attention.
Surprisingly, the artist painted the main character not a peasant or a worker, but a man who lives in abundance and in his spare time is engaged in fishing.
The man is very neatly dressed and looks good.
There is no fatigue or longing in his gaze, on the contrary, his gaze is playful and relaxed, it is clear that he is passionate about the process.
The amount of fishing utensils also attracts attention.
In the picture, everything is depicted in such a way that if the old man suddenly needs something, he will easily take it and he does not need to reach out.

Behind, the artist depicted another fisherman, who looks with envy at his competitor and sticks a worm more closely, hoping to catch a big fish to show off to the old man.
If you look closely, you can see birch trees against the background of the morning sky.
With his painting, Perov wanted to remind us of the harmony and unity of man with nature, that we need to be distracted from the bustle of the city more often, paying attention to our hobbies.
What is behind all the variety of computer games, we have forgotten how to appreciate the present, and are used to living in a virtual world and making friends with virtual friends.
We have developed a dependence on the virtual world.

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Aunt Olya looked into my room, again caught me behind the papers, and, raising her voice, said commandingly:
- Will write something! Go get some air, help cut the flower bed. Aunt Olya took out a birch bark box from the closet. While I gladly kneaded my back, raking the damp earth with a rake, she sat down on a mound and poured sachets and bundles of flower seeds onto her knees and sorted them into varieties.
“Olga Petrovna, what is it,” I remark, “do you not sow poppies in flowerbeds?” “Well, which of the poppies is the color!” she answered confidently. - It's a vegetable. It is sown in the beds along with onions and cucumbers.
- What do you! I laughed. - In some old song it is sung:
And her forehead, like marble, is white. And the cheeks are burning, as if the color of poppies.
“It only blooms for two days,” Olga Petrovna persisted. - For a flower bed, this does not fit in any way, puffed and immediately burned out. And then all summer this mallet sticks out and only spoils the view.
But all the same, I secretly poured a pinch of poppy into the very middle of the flower bed. She turned green after a few days.
- Have you planted poppies? - Aunt Olya approached me. - Oh, you are such a mischievous! So be it, leave the top three, you felt sorry. And shed the rest.
Unexpectedly, I left on business and returned only two weeks later. After a hot, tiring road, it was nice to enter Aunt Olya's quiet old house. The freshly washed floor was cool. A jasmine bush growing under the window cast a lacy shadow on the desk.
- Pour kvass? she suggested, looking sympathetically at me, sweaty and tired. - Alyoshka was very fond of kvass. It used to happen that he himself bottled and sealed it. When I rented this room, Olga Petrovna, raising her eyes to the portrait of a young man in a flight uniform that hangs over the desk, asked:
- Doesn't it hurt? - What are you doing! - This is my son Alexei. And the room was his. Well, you settle down, live on health.
Handing me a heavy copper mug with kvass, Aunt Olya said:
- And your poppies have risen, the buds have already been thrown away. I went to look at the flowers. The flower bed was unrecognizable. Along the very edge was spread a rug, which, with its thick cover with flowers scattered over it, very much resembled a real carpet. Then the flower bed was girded with a ribbon of matthiols - modest night flowers that attract not by brightness, but by a gently bitter aroma, similar to the smell of vanilla. Curtains of yellow-violet pansies were full of flowers, purple-velvet hats of Parisian beauties swayed on thin legs. There were many other familiar and unfamiliar colors. And in the center of the flower bed, above all this flower diversity, my poppies rose, throwing three tight, heavy buds towards the sun.
They broke up the next day.
Aunt Olya went out to water the flower bed, but immediately returned, rattling an empty watering can.
- Well, go look, bloomed.
From a distance, the poppies looked like lit torches with live, merrily blazing flames in the wind. A light wind swayed a little, the sun pierced the translucent scarlet petals with light, which made the poppies either flare up with a quivering bright fire, or fill with a thick crimson. It seemed that if you just touched it, they would immediately scorch! Poppies blinded with their mischievous, burning brightness, and next to them all these Parisian beauties, snapdragons and other flower aristocracy faded, dimmed.
Poppies burned wildly for two days. And at the end of the second day, they suddenly crumbled and went out. And immediately on a lush flower bed without them it became empty.
I picked up from the ground still quite fresh, in drops of dew, a petal and straightened it in my palm.
“That's all,” I said loudly, with a feeling of admiration that had not yet cooled down.
- Yes, it burned down ... - Aunt Olya sighed, as if in a living being. - And somehow I used to pay no attention to this poppy. His life is short. But without looking back, lived to the fullest. And it happens to people...
Aunt Olya, somehow hunched over, suddenly hurried into the house.
I have already been told about her son. Aleksei died diving on his tiny "hawk" onto the back of a heavy fascist bomber...
I now live on the other side of the city and occasionally visit Aunt Olya. I recently visited her again. We sat at the summer table, drank tea, shared the news. And next to it, a large carpet of poppies was blazing in a flower bed. Some crumbled, dropping petals to the ground like sparks, others only opened their fiery tongues. And from below, from the damp, full of vitality of the earth, more and more tightly rolled buds rose up to keep the living fire from going out.

Meanings in other dictionaries

Novalis - Heinrich Von Ofterdingen

The work is based on the legend of the famous minnesinger of the 13th century. Heinrich von Ofterdingen. The external event canvas is only a necessary material shell for depicting the deep inner process of the poet's formation and Heinrich's comprehension of the ideal of life, allegorically depicted by Novalis in the form of a "blue flower". The main semantic load is carried by Henry's dreams, ...

Main characters: narrator and aunt Olya

In this story, the author himself seems to be renting a room from an elderly woman. In the room reserved for the tenant, there is a photograph of a young man in a pilot's suit. The hostess asks if the portrait will interfere with the tenant. But the narrator doesn't mind. Then she (Aunt Olya) explains that it was her son's room, and he died as a young man. It feels like a woman is suffering.

After a while, a woman begins to treat her tenant with maternal care. For example, she advises him not to sit all the time with books, but to walk more. And then he notices that Aunt Olya is making a flower bed, planting all sorts of "fashionable" flowers. And the narrator says that he likes just poppies - they bloom so brightly and beautifully. However, the hostess laughs, because the poppy is a "vegetable". Its seeds are added, for example, to baking. And it blooms for several days, and when the petals fall off, until autumn, an ugly "mallet" sticks out in the middle of the flower bed - a stalk with seeds.

The young man did not argue with the woman. However, he nevertheless poured a handful of poppy seeds into the middle of the flower bed.
A few weeks later, the hostess noticed a strange growth in the flower bed, especially in the very center. Of course, she guessed whose hands it was. And even reproached the young tenant for such a joke. But still, she did not begin to weed out the sprouts.

A short time passed, the poppy blossomed. And, as the story goes, all the flower beauties in the flower bed faded before him. Such bright poppy petals, playing in the sun, are light! Most of all, they look like a flame... Aunt Olya fell silent. She had to recognize the beauty of a simple poppy. And even when the petals flew around, and the poppy remained "ugly", the woman did not return to her former opinion.

The tenant moved out due to life circumstances. However, sometimes he still comes to visit with pleasure. And a year later, the narrator noticed that there were no more garden flowers on that very flower bed, but only a "semi-wild" poppy. And its flame does not die out, because some flowers crumble, but others bloom. Beautiful, in fact. The flowerbed turned into an eternal flame.

Here an analogy is drawn with the life of Aunt Olya's son. He lived a heroic, bright and short life. Now from him only a photograph, like a stalk from a poppy. Maybe her son would have been alive if he had hidden from life and work ... But would he be happy like that? And the woman felt it.

The story teaches to appreciate not so much the longitude, the length of something, the standards of beauty and life, but its brightness, life in the moment.

Picture or drawing Living flame

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