The Beginning of Spring | Alexei Savrasov Holiday Card

Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov, according to Isaac Levitan, ‘created the Russian landscape’; found an earlier unprecedented expression of a poetic sense of admiration for the beauty of his native nature, which ‘… was already guessed by Pushkin’. Capacity for painting in the future artist showed up in his early youth. Savrasov graduated from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he studied under K.I. Rabus, and then for 25 years he taught there, leading a landscape class. Savrasov inspired a galaxy of young artists, his students, for a lively and reverent attitude, a lyrical experience of the beauty of the simplest village motifs. He finally departed from the academic tradition and managed to show that nature does not need embellishment. The artist saw the beauty and showed it to others where it had never occurred to anyone to look for it. ‘Go to nature… There is inexplicable beauty. Spring. We must learn from nature. You need to see beauty, to understand, to love… If there is no soul, there will be nothing in painting… You need mood. Nature always breathes, always sings, and her song is solemn. There is no higher enjoyment then contemplation of nature. Earth is a paradise - and life is a secret, a beautiful secret. The artist is the same as a poet’ - he instructed his pets, future famous artists, one of whom, Isaac Levitan, achieved genuine perfection in creating lyrical images of Russian nature, continuing the Savrasov line of ‘mood landscape’. Alexei Savrasov’s favourite time of the year was spring, when the artist’s soul was filled with a special ‘spring inspiration’, and this is probably why he gives the name ‘The Beginning of Spring’ to almost winter landscape created in 1888, where the currents of awakening are felt.