Girls. Palm Sunday

Дівчата. Вербна неділя

Year1900

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions181.5 × 187.5 cm

LocationTaganrog Art Museum

Blonska's Academy diploma painting shows a group of girls at a Palm Sunday night service, holding pussy-willow branches and burning candles, with the blue night sky visible through the open church doors. She built the composition so that the girls' faces answer the faces of the saints in the wall paintings behind them, and kept the whole canvas in pale, clear tones; she gave the picture to the city of Taganrog in 1942.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

About the Artist

Serafyma Blonska

1870–1947

Serafyma Blonska was a Ukrainian painter born in Verkhnodniprovsk on the Dnipro, trained at Mykola Murashko's Kyiv Drawing School and at the Imperial Academy of Arts, with further study in Italy. Her 1900 diploma canvas Girls. Palm Sunday, a candle-lit church interior full of girls holding willow branches, is one of the finest Ukrainian paintings of Easter-cycle ritual. With her husband, the Myrhorod-born painter Oleksandr Leontovskyi, she ran a drawing school in Taganrog for eighteen years, teaching orphaned children free of charge.

View artist profile →

Movement

Realism

Realism is an artistic movement that sought to depict reality as accurately and objectively as possible, holding that the purpose of art is to reflect all aspects of existence, rather than merely its idealized representation. The term was introduced by the French literary critic Jules Champfleury in the 1850s to denote art that opposed Romanticism and Academicism. In the visual arts, the significance of Realism as a style is quite controversial, and its boundaries are undefined. In a narrower sense, realism is understood as positivism, a movement in the visual arts of the second half of the 19th century. One of the first realists was the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who opened his solo exhibition “The Pavilion of Realism” in Paris in 1855. Before him, artists of the Barbizon School—Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Jules Breton—worked in a realistic style. In the 1870s, realism split into two main movements: naturalism and impressionism. In contemporary painting, realism borders on the grotesque and anti-glamour.

Explore movement →

Related Works

1903

Geese

A small plein-air study of a flock of geese in bright daylight, painted three years after her diploma work in a much freer, more broken touch. It belongs to the group of Blonska's canvases preserved in the Taganrog Art Museum.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

1903

Poppies

A field of poppies painted directly from nature, with the flowers set down in loaded red touches against loose green. Together with Geese it shows the lighter, sketch-like side of Blonska's practice after her academic training.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

1840

Self-portrait

Taras Shevchenko

1841

The Gypsy Fortune Teller

Taras Shevchenko