The Melon Field (Bakhcha)

Бахча

Year1890

MediumOil on canvas

A southern melon and watermelon plantation under a high summer sun, one of the two works most often cited as Krachkovskyi's Ukrainian subjects. The picture is dated by Wikimedia Commons only to the 1890s or 1900s.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

About the Artist

Yosyp Krachkovskyi

1854–1914

Yosyp (Iosif) Krachkovskyi was a landscape painter of Polish descent, born in Warsaw and trained at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, where he spent his career. He is best known for luminous Crimean landscapes and flowering-garden scenes, and for a group of Ukrainian subjects including 'Ukrainian Evening' (1889).

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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.

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Related Works

1886

At the Well

A village well with figures, painted in Krachkovskyi's academic-realist manner two years after he was made an academician. Wikimedia Commons files it under paintings of Ukraine by the artist.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

1888

Before the Thunderstorm. At the End of Summer

A large late-summer landscape of 1888 with a storm building over open country, and one of Krachkovskyi's most ambitious canvases by scale. Held by the Odesa Art Museum.

public-domain

1889

Ukrainian Evening

Krachkovskyi's best-known Ukrainian subject and one of his most widely reproduced pictures, showing a village at dusk under a warm, dying light. It belongs to the late-nineteenth-century vogue for the 'Ukrainian evening' motif popularised by Kuindzhi.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

1889

Twilight on the River

An 1889 river scene at dusk, from the same years as Krachkovskyi's Ukrainian harvest and evening subjects.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain