Poppies
Маки
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.
Related Works
Girls. Palm Sunday
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.
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.
Summer in Ukraine (Summer in Little Russia)
Petro Levchenko
Requested priority title «Літо в Україні», via its historical variant «Лето в Малороссии».
Spring
Mariia Bashkirtseva
A large decorative panel, begun from studies made in an old orchard, showing a young woman leaning back against a tree with her eyes closed and a faint smile, wrapped in blossoming apple and peach branches. Bashkirtseva described the idea in her diary as a figure dissolved into a tender green landscape, and painted it in the same muted browns and greens Bastien-Lepage used for his plein-air peasants.