Rye Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1832-1898)

Description of Ivan Shishkin’s painting The Rye

Along a road track stretching somewhere beyond the horizon, the rye is gilding, its full spike falling to the ground. As if it were crawling under the wheels of passing traffic, begging that it was time to clean it up. An endless field of rye, tall trees, a huge blue sky, quiet weather, insects flying by.

It’s a little hot, but not so hot that it spoils the impression of the surrounding beauty. The picture is as if inviting to plunge into this vast expanse of fields and soft grain.

The road track is accompanied by soft, silky grass, beckoning one to lie down and rest in the midst of the baking sun. Mighty pine trees reappear in the painting as a sign of the greatness of the homeland.

The artist has successfully enough combined together unconnected things: a field of rye crossed by a road track, bright green grass sprouting among the trampled ground, tall pines, which, in principle, in this peaceful summer landscape only create the impression of incompleteness of the work. After all, one wants to understand: where are they going all the time and how did they magically get here?

This picture is known to many people not even exactly as a work of Shishkin, but as an ordinary picture, depicted on calendars, magazine covers. And it is not strange at all, why such works, in this style are valued more. After all, they carry in themselves the power and greatness of the Russian land, the generosity and wealth of the homeland, the charm and splendor of the harvest fields, because all these delights are created by human hands, real patriots and toilers.

Shishkin presented the landscape to us as a highlight of what we see daily, but do not pay attention to. What mother nature has given us, but we are unable to preserve it all. It shows us the naturalness of the world around us, to protect us from ourselves, from our destructive influence.