El guardabosques

In the summer of 1874 thousands of educated young Russians walked out into the villages to rouse the peasants, the campaign they called going to the people. Kramskoi painted this forester that same year, and he told Tretyakov, the collector who bought it, exactly what he was after: one of those men who grasp the injustice of peasant life and carry a discontent that borders on hatred. So the guarded eyes under the heavy cap are the point. He wears a fur-trimmed coat, a woodsman used to hard winters, but the picture is really a study of a mood the authorities feared. Kramskoi had helped lead the young painters who walked out of the Academy in 1863 to paint ordinary Russians like this one.