The Mermaids

Kramskoi finished this in 1871 and showed it at the very first exhibition of the Peredvizhniki, the group of Russian painters who had just broken with the official academy to take realist art to ordinary people around the country. That makes the subject a surprise. Instead of peasants or social hardship, he painted rusalki, the drowned-girl water spirits of Slavic folklore, gathered on a riverbank under a full moon. He drew the scene from a Gogol story set on a Ukrainian night, and what critics singled out was the moonlight itself, the pale silver he had found for the water and the mist. It hung in that first show beside Savrasov's spring landscape of returning rooks, the two pictures people remembered most.