Der überwucherte Teich

By 1879 Vasily Polenov had joined the Wanderers, the group of Russian painters who broke from the academy to tour their work around the country and turned increasingly to plain national landscape. This quiet picture belongs to a small cluster of his from those years, alongside Moscow Courtyard and Grandmother's Garden, that critics later called a lyrical trilogy. He had sketched the setting two years earlier while visiting his parents in a village near Kyiv, then finished the canvas in Moscow. A wooden footbridge slips into the shade at the right, and the still water is closing over with weeds and the reflections of trees. It first went on public view at the Wanderers' exhibition that opened in April 1879.