Backwoods

Глухомань

ArtistPetro Levchenko

MovementRealism

Year1905

MediumOil on canvas

LocationNational Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv

A secluded, overgrown corner of nature in Levchenko's quiet lyrical style.

About the Artist

Petro Levchenko

1856–1917

Kharkiv landscape painter of intimate, lyrical Ukrainian villages and courtyards in increasingly impressionist colour; ~800 landscapes.

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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

1880

Summer in Ukraine (Summer in Little Russia)

Requested priority title «Літо в Україні», via its historical variant «Лето в Малороссии».

public-domain

1890

A View of the Kharkiv Region, by the River

A wide, low-horizon view of the Slobozhanshchyna countryside above a river, the subject Levchenko returned to more than any other. The landscape is built from muted greens and greys that register the humidity of the air rather than local colour.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

1890

A Holiday Table

One of the quiet interiors that form the second strand of Levchenko's output, showing a laid table in a domestic room. The picture treats an empty, waiting interior with the same atmospheric attention he gave to open landscape.

wikimedia-commonspublic-domain

1890

At Dawn

Requested priority title («На зорі» / 'At Dawn').

public-domain