Valerian Konstantinovich Kamenev

The canvas has been strip-lined. The painting is clean and ready to hang. There are patches of paint shrinkage here and there for eg. to the trees in the centre of the composition. Some imperfections in the weave of the canvas show through along the top. UV light shows a few scattered spots of minor re-touching to the sky. However the presence of a layer of uneven flourescing varnish prevents a more conclusive examination. Held in a painted wooden gold frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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This sunlit vision of agrarian simplicity represents a fascinating period of Russian landscape painting, during which traditional Italianate views of the countryside became eclipsed by the less idealised vision vaunted by Alexei Venetsianov and his school (fig.1). Venetsianov had succeeded in eroding the hierarchies of Academic art by introducing and legitimising peasant subjects, a vital step in the democratisation of subject matter, and he combined prosaic and poetic elements to create landscapes that were neither dramatic nor sublime, but tranquil. The modelled, strongly lit forms of the figures in Kamenev's Harvest, recall his deliberate and individual figures and those that people the canvases of his talented pupil, Grigory Soroka, whose innocent pictures of the countryside of Tver province are extremely rare (fig 4).

Kamenev's composition, in particular the brilliant detail of the golden crops and the low horizon line which produces the liberating effect of space and light, invariably recall Shishkin's later Midday, On the Outskirts of Moscow (1869), his 'song of joy' as enthusiasts of the Peredvizhniki termed the work (fig.2). Despite its distinctive national flavour, Kamenev also draws on Western European models. The extreme precision and romantic overtones of Harvest are characteristic for example, of landscapes by Andreas Achenbach (1815-1910), an artist who flourished in Russia and who was even granted a knighthood by Alexander II.

The concept of the rodina permeates Russian thought, art, music and legend in the mid-19^th century, and the relationship between the peasant and the land was a matter of fundamental importance. In Russian literature, this comes to the fore from 1840 onwards, when we increasingly find frequent realistic depictions of the landscape, perhaps most famously in Turgenev's A Huntsman's Sketches (1852). As Sjeng Scheijen comments in his essay Slaves of Literature: Literature, Visual Art and Landscape Art (2003), the fact that Turgenev and others granted such importance to the description of the land in their prose, not only provided great inspiration for artist, but in time it also brought an added status to the genre. Kamenev's magnificent composition is a near direct pictorial representation of the opening to Turgenev's Bezhin Meadow:

'It was a glorious July day, one of those days which only come after many days of fine weather...About midday there is wont to be, high up in the sky, a multitude of rounded clouds, golden-grey, with soft white edges. Like islands scattered over an overflowing river, that bathes them in its unbroken reaches of deep transparent blue, they scarcely stir; farther down the heavens they are in movement, packing closer; now there is no blue to be seen between them, but they are themselves almost as blue as the sky, filled full with light and heat. The colour of the horizon, a faint pale lilac, does not change all day, and is the same all round...'

'On such days all the colours are softened, bright but not glaring; everything is suffused with a kind of touching tenderness... In the pure dry air there is a scent of wormwood, rye in blossom, and buckwheat; even an hour before nightfall there is no moisture in the air. It is for such weather that the farmer longs, for harvesting his wheat' (I.Turgenev, A Sportsman's Sketches, 1852).

Kamenev had travelled in Western Europe, where he painted many studies and sketches, but was based principally in St. Petersburg until 1869, when he moved to Gatchina. Though he took part in numerous exhibitions held by the Imperial Academy of Artists and the St. Petersburg Society of Artists, very few of his works exist outside museum collections (fig.3).