Haymaking

Сінокіс

Year1887

MediumOil on canvas

Mowers at work in a summer meadow, painted the year Serheiev was elected an honorary free associate of the Imperial Academy. The picture places its figures small inside a broad, hazy field rather than making them the subject.

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About the Artist

Mykola Serheiev

1855–1919

Mykola Serheiev was a landscape painter born in Kharkiv in 1855 who built his career in St Petersburg and died of typhus back in Kharkiv in 1919. Although catalogued almost everywhere as a Russian painter, his subjects were overwhelmingly Ukrainian: orchards, village gardens, the Dnipro and the Kharkiv-region countryside.

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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

1888

Fishing on the Dnipro

Fishermen working a seine net on the Dnipro, one of Serheiev's few compositions built around labour rather than pure landscape. The wide river and low bank are treated with the same soft, even light as his garden pictures.

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1889

The Garden

An overgrown village garden painted in the year Serheiev received both the Order of St Stanislaus and an honourable mention in Paris. It is one of the clearest statements of his preferred subject: an enclosed, sun-filled garden with no anecdote in it.

public-domain

1895

Apple Trees in Blossom. In Ukraine

A Ukrainian orchard in full flower, catalogued in the nineteenth century under the imperial term 'Little Russia'. The blossom is handled as a dense screen of broken white and pink, the closest Serheiev came to impressionist paint.

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1900

Street in a Ukrainian Village

Extra.

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