Auf dem Ackerfeld. Frühling

In the 1820s Alexey Venetsianov did something almost no Russian painter had done. He left the capital and the official art world and settled on his small estate to paint the peasants who worked his land, at a time when most of them were serfs, legally bound to it. Here a young woman leads two horses and a harrow across a spring field, walking almost weightlessly, dressed far too finely for farm labour. That was deliberate. The first day of ploughing was treated as a holiday, and people put on their good clothes for it. In the corner a baby sits at the edge of the furrows. Venetsianov gave more than half the picture to the sky, studying how the clouds banked and drifted above the small figures below.