Rural Landscape

The stage-set artist and master of easel painting Nikolay Klodt graduated from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he later was a teacher himself. Klodt was a member of the Association of Itinerant Exhibitions and the Union of Russian Artists. His professional career was predetermined by the atmosphere in his notable family and the people around him. The artist’s grandfather, Petr Karlovich Klodt was the creator of the sculptural group “Tamer of horses” on the Anichkov Bridge in St. Petersburg, and his uncle was Mikhail Konstantinovich Klodt, a famous itinerant artist.

In his “Rural Landscape” the artist effectively conveys the unhurried nature and steady rhythm of rural life. It is a traditional countryside scene: a horse grazes as hens wander by in the foreground, drawing the viewer into the space of the image. To the side, a log house and a hay barn with folded bales underneath reflect the hard labor of the peasants. Fir trees rise above the buildings and slender birches grow nearby. The roads scatter to different directions, one of them leads the spectator down the hill and further to distant horizons.

The lyrical intonations of the “Rural landscape” are typical of the works of the itinerant artists of the 1890s, who departed from the accusatory rhetoric of critical realism. His ability to see beauty in prosaic natural phenomena and modest peasant lives bring Nikolay Klodt close to landscape painters such as Vasily Polenov and Alexey Savrasov.

Paintings featured in this exhibition:

"New Arrivals. Exhibition of recent acquisitions" - The Institute of Russian Realist Art - Moscow, Russia (18.10.2013 - 26.01.2014).