La visión al joven Bartolomé

By 1889 Russian painting was mostly social realism, the Wanderers showing peasants and prisons and hard weather. Nesterov went the other way. He spent that late summer near Abramtsevo, in the quiet country outside Moscow, and put into paint a scene from the old life of Sergius of Radonezh, the monk who would become one of Russia's most revered saints. Here he is still a boy named Bartholomew, sent out to find a lost foal, and instead meeting a strange elder under an oak. Look at the thin gold light on the fields behind them, the slender birch, the pale sky. Nesterov worked much of the landscape from what he could see around him. When the painting appeared at the Wanderers' exhibition the next year it split the critics, some moved, some baffled by all that stillness. Pavel Tretyakov bought it anyway, and it hung in the gallery that still carries his name. Nesterov was 27 when he made it, and returned to Sergius again and again for the rest of his working life.