Alexei Savrasov

Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov was born in Moscow on 24 May 1830 (12 May in the Julian calendar), into a merchant family; his father hoped he would go into trade, but he trained as a painter instead. At the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture he studied under Karl Rabus and specialised in landscape. In 1854 he painted the Gulf of Finland coast near Saint Petersburg, and canvases such as View in the Neighbourhood of Oranienbaum (1854) brought him recognition from the Imperial Academy of Arts. In the 1860s he travelled to London and Switzerland, and the influence of John Constable on his eye is often noted.

From 1857 or 1858 (sources differ) Savrasov taught at the Moscow school, where he led the landscape class until 1882; Isaac Levitan and Konstantin Korovin were among his pupils. In 1870 he was one of the founders of the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, who broke with official academic art. His best-known canvas, The Rooks Have Returned (1871), grew out of studies made in March 1871 at Molvitino, in the Kostroma region. Pavel Tretyakov bought it that summer, and it hung at the first Peredvizhniki exhibition in Saint Petersburg, opened on 28 November 1871. Rooks, thawing snow and a village church make a lyrical subject of ordinary countryside.

Savrasov was dismissed from the school in 1882 and spent his last years in poverty, worn down by alcoholism from the late 1870s. He died in a Moscow hospital for the poor on 8 October 1897 (26 September in the Julian calendar) and was buried at Vagankovo Cemetery. He left what Russians came to call the lyrical, or mood, landscape. His canvases rely on a subdued palette of earth tones, greys and soft greens, on low light, and on the contrast between wet ground, snow and sky: qualities that lend themselves to hand-painted reproduction in oil.

Biographical details on Wikipedia.