Prato bagnato

Fyodor Vasilyev painted this water-meadow in 1872 from a room in the Crimea, where he had moved for his health. His lungs were failing, tuberculosis would kill him the next year at 23, and the flat, rain-washed northern country in the picture was nowhere near him. He built it from memory and a few old sketches, the low horizon, the dark pond, the storm light sliding off to one side while a brighter patch opens over the wet grass. Russian critics later treated the canvas as a starting point for a whole strain of lyrical landscape, painting that carries a mood rather than a grand view. It took a prize at a Saint Petersburg competition that year, sent up from the Crimea by a young man who knew he would probably never see those meadows again.