USSR 1970+ Table souvenir painting made of brass. Engraving, embossing. Wooden stand. Concave brass engraving. Size. The diameter is 12 centimeters. The weight is 50 grams. Thin metal. The story of one masterpiece: "The Knight at the Crossroads" by Viktor Vasnetsov. The choice of a life path, the main idea of the picture. Viktor Vasnetsov is an artist - philosopher who poses important questions to his audience - "What will you do?". "As I drive straight, I don't live — there is no way for a passer—by, or a passer-by, or a fly-by. I'm going to be married. Nalevu ekhati — bogatu beti". An old text from Russian epics about Ilya Muromets haunted the artist Viktor Vasnetsov all his life. The theme of choosing a path, when the whole life path changes dramatically, constantly arose before him. The famous painting "The Knight at the Crossroads" became one of the results of Vasnetsov's many years of work. Russian Russian peredvizhnik artist and architect Viktor Vasnetsov in the mid-1870s moved in his work from the traditional everyday scenes for Russian painting of that time to historical and folklore themes. He started working on this painting with a small pencil sketch. Its main plot originated thanks to the Russian epic "Ilya Muromets and the robbers". The painter was "convinced that in genre and historical paintings, statues, and in general any work of art — image, sound, word — in fairy tales, song, epic, drama, and so on, the whole image of the people, internal and external, with the past and present, and maybe the future, is reflected". In the final form, the master performed the work for the VI Traveling Exhibition of 1878. It became Vasnetsov's first major work on the epic theme and marked the beginning of a whole cycle of canvases. Up to ten author's variations of this composition are known, among them the painting of 1882, which the author wrote for the collection of a major industrialist and entrepreneur, a famous patron of those times Savva Mamontov, is especially famous. It can be seen in the State Russian Museum. The presented version was written in 1878. If on the canvas from the VI Traveling Exhibition the figure of the rider was directed to the viewer, then in this version the knight is already deployed in profile, and in the picture from the Russian Museum he is completely turned to the viewer with his back. According to the artist's plan, the beholder had to gradually immerse himself in the narrative. Turning away his hero in a later version, he shifted the focus from the hero himself to the landscape in front of his eyes and the inscription on the stone. There is no crossroads and the choice of one of the three roads in most of the repetitions of his painting, the painter removed them for greater emotional effect. The dramatic situation of the borderland is shown. The hero found himself on the edge of an alien, disastrous wild field and must overcome this milestone. In an early version of the work, the inscription on the stone repeated the epic text in its entirety, but later the artist left only a menacing ending: "How straight I go — I don't live, there is no way for either a passerby, a passerby, or a flyover." According to art critics, the theme of the tense fateful choice of the path is reinforced by the "Hamlet" dialogue: the profile of the Knight is directed directly at the human skull lying next to the boundary stone. The subdued colors of twilight increase the mood of anxiety, but the figure of the white horse is read against this background as a harbinger of the coming victory of the hero of the canvas. 100% ORIGINAL! USSR Good condition (see photo) nice and rare item for your collection Ask me any questions. |