This book was published in 1973 by the Aurora Publishing House in Leningrad; some of this publisher's books have been translated and published through Parkstone Press. This book, which has 244 pages, contains 61 full colour reproductions of paintings ( by Venetsianov and his students) in addition to black and white illustrations. There is a bibliography, short entries about the individual paintings and illustrations, and a list of exhibitions of Venetsianov's work.

Alexey Venetsianov, 1780-1847, born into a merchant family of Greek descent in Moscow, worked first as a civil servant, copying old masters and painting intimate lyrical portraits. In 1819, he moved to the village of Safonkovo (Tver' Province), where he painted genre scenes of country life and portraits of peasants. Working from the model which , at the time, was against the rules of the Imperial Academy of Arts, he recorded beauty in real life , created an idealised image of the lives of peasants and their dignity, and painted lyrical landscapes outdoors.

The most important member of his school was Grigoriy Soroka, a serf, but it was his influence on The Wanderers (nothing to do with Bolton), an artists' cooperative of Russian realists who, in protest against its conservatism, resigned from the Academy. In 1870, they formed the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions, an important and influential grouping in Russian 19th Century art history. Whilst the work of The Wanderers is now rather more familiar that it was in the 1980s, Venetsianov's paintings are not as widely known outside Russia and this book offers an excellent opportunity to rectify this.