The Monastery of the Caves near Nizhny Novgorod

Aleksey Savrasov · 1871 · oil on canvas

The painting

Savrasov painted the Monastery of the Caves in 1871, the same year as The Rooks Have Come Back, the picture that is generally considered the founding work of modern Russian landscape painting. The view shows the Pechersky Ascension Monastery on the high right bank of the Volga, a few kilometres downstream from Nizhny Novgorod, with the river broad and bright in the middle distance and a stretch of low cloud above the cathedral domes.

It is a typical Savrasov picture: a humble, intimate observation of a familiar Russian landscape, low-keyed in colour, atmospheric rather than scenic, with no human figures and no event. The monastery itself — a working religious community founded in 1328 — sits on the high bank in the half-distance, its white walls and gold domes catching the changeable light.

The Pechersky Monastery

The Pechersky (literally "of the caves") Ascension Monastery was founded by St. Dionysius of Suzdal in the 1330s on a hillside east of the Nizhny Novgorod kremlin. The original cave-cells gave the monastery its name. After a major landslide in 1597 destroyed the original site, the monastery was rebuilt on the present plateau by Patriarch Filaret, father of the first Romanov tsar; the present-day Ascension Cathedral, refectory church, and bell tower date from the 1630s and 1640s. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it served as the senior monastery of the Nizhny Novgorod eparchy.

Savrasov visited Nizhny Novgorod on a Volga trip in 1870 and the picture is one of several from that journey — others include views of Yuryevets, the river at Plyos, and the Volga floodlands.

Savrasov and the Wanderers

Aleksey Savrasov is the central figure of nineteenth-century Russian landscape painting. Trained at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, he became its professor of landscape in 1857 and held the position for twenty-five years. He was a founding member of the Peredvizhniki (the Itinerants) in 1870, the breakaway society of Russian Realist painters that organised travelling exhibitions outside the Imperial Academy in Saint Petersburg.

His student Isaac Levitan called him "the father of modern Russian landscape" — a judgement that subsequent Russian art history has confirmed without serious revision. Where the older landscape tradition treated Russia in a borrowed Romantic or Düsseldorfer idiom, Savrasov found a specifically Russian visual register: muted, lyrical, deeply attached to the unspectacular features of provincial Russia — birch groves, melting snow, the broad bend of a river under low cloud.

Technique and atmosphere

The picture is built on a low horizon — about one third up the canvas — with most of the surface given to a vast, broken sky in greys, faint pinks, and watery blues. Savrasov was a master of the thin, scrubbed application of paint to capture this kind of low Russian light; the clouds are worked wet-into-wet with very little oil-loaded brushwork, producing the silvery quality that is his signature.

The middle ground is the landscape's only sharply defined element: the white walls and gold cupolas of the Pechersky monastery, with a few scattered figures on the river path so small as to be almost invisible. The foreground is loose — grasses, the curve of a path, the muddy edge of the high bank — handled with the kind of brevity Savrasov also brought to The Rooks Have Come Back.

Provenance and reproduction

The picture is held in a Russian regional museum collection (variants and studies of the same view exist in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod). Black-and-white reproductions appeared widely in Russian and Soviet art-historical publications. Contemporary high-resolution images are available through the Wikimedia Commons collection of Savrasov's work and Russian museum online catalogues.

Further reading

• Olga Atroshchenko, Aleksei Savrasov (Moscow: Tretyakov Gallery, 2005)
• David Jackson, The Russian Vision: The Art of Ilya Repin and the Wanderers (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2006)
• Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg — Savrasov holdings catalogue