Landscape near Kharkiv

Пейзаж під Харковом

MediumOil on cardboard

Dimensions13 × 24 cm

LocationNational Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv

A small oil study of the countryside outside Kharkiv, dated by art-catalog.ru to the 1890s (not the 1900s) and held by the National Art Museum of Ukraine. Part of the large body of intimate Sloboda Ukraine studies Vasylkivskyi painted close to home.

Image: reproduction sourced from art-catalog.ru. The work itself is in the public domain.

public-domain

About the Artist

Serhii Vasylkivskyi

1854–1917

Prolific Kharkiv landscape, genre and history painter and authority on Ukrainian folk ornament; left ~3,000 works and donated ~1,500 to the Kharkiv Art Museum.

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Movements

Realism

Realism is an artistic movement that sought to depict reality as accurately and objectively as possible, holding that the purpose of art is to reflect all aspects of existence, rather than merely its idealized representation. The term was introduced by the French literary critic Jules Champfleury in the 1850s to denote art that opposed Romanticism and Academicism. In the visual arts, the significance of Realism as a style is quite controversial, and its boundaries are undefined. In a narrower sense, realism is understood as positivism, a movement in the visual arts of the second half of the 19th century. One of the first realists was the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who opened his solo exhibition “The Pavilion of Realism” in Paris in 1855. Before him, artists of the Barbizon School—Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Jules Breton—worked in a realistic style. In the 1870s, realism split into two main movements: naturalism and impressionism. In contemporary painting, realism borders on the grotesque and anti-glamour.

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Also part of

Impressionism