Russian genre painting "Shepherd" school of Alexei Gavrilovich Venetsianov. Canvas / oil 36Х49cm. Unknown master of the Venetsianov school.
The painting depicts a shepherd lying on a whip in the shade of a tree and having fun with a dog. The herd is abandoned, bliss, fun and laziness attract him. The pastoral serenity of folk life is the optics of idealizing Venetsianov and his school. Romanticism in folk costumes. Nevertheless, as a shepherd boy, he has no power over the dog and over him there is a symbol of the power of fatal forces - a tree. The blows of fate broke off the branches and exposed the roots. It is here an example of the will of another power. In the meantime, the shepherd boy picturesquely stretched out in a diagonal in the picture, in all the attributes of peasant life, a shirt embroidered with red, faded blue trousers, a high hat and crochets on his bare feet.
Typologically, the shepherdesses of the Venetian school, in addition to the antiquated pastoral, also carry the metaphysical contemplative pause characteristic of romanticism. In this case, these functions were delegated to symbolic objects, and the artists close attention was shifted to the costume, the details of ethnography, which speaks of the Western European influence on the author.
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