Rural life by Arkadiy Plastov

Arkadiy Alexandrovich Plastov was a Soviet painter, academician of the Academy of Arts of the USSR (1947), people’s Artist of the USSR (1962), the winner of the Lenin Prize (1966) and the Stalin Prize of the first degree (1946).
Arkadiy Plastov was born on January 19 (31), 1893 in the village of Prislonikha (now Karsunsky district, Ulyanovsk region) into the family of icon painters.
Three years after studying in a rural school, Plastov entered the Simbirsk Divinity School. After school he studied at the Simbirsk Theological Seminary, and then decided to get an art education and went to Moscow. For some time he worked in the studio of I.I. Mashkov, and then entered the Imperial Stroganov Central Art and Industrial School, where one of his teachers was F.F. Fedorovsky.

His teachers were famous artists: sculptor S.M. Volnukhin, painters A.M. Korin, A.M. Vasnetsov, A.E. Arkhipov, A.S. Stepanov, L.O. Pasternak.
In 1917 he returned to his native village, where he began painting.
Plastov painted his village, his fellow villagers – milkmaids, shepherds, old-timers who remembered their lives on a bench in the evening.
At the autumn exhibition in 1935 in Moscow, several small paintings of Plastov were shown. They immediately attracted the attention of the public with their uniqueness and truthfulness.

A fire in a field, 1969

In the terrible 1942, when the Hitler hordes came to the banks of the Volga, Plastov painted The Fascist Has Flown. Everything is quiet and calm all around, the sky is clear and there is a herd at the edge of the autumn forest. The death of the shepherd is ridiculous and terrible in this autumn landscape…
Person’s connection with nature is very characteristic for Plastov’s paintings. Landscapes in his paintings help to understand the world of working people. He seldom depicts noisy festivities and his characters are almost always busy with their usual work.
The picturesque chronicle of Prislonikha village, created by Plastov, is closely connected with the life of the vast country.
Arkadiy Plastov died on May 12, 1972 in his native village Prislonikha.
Plastov’s works are kept in many museums in Russia.