vrubel a bogatyr 1898 Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910)

Description of Mikhail Vrubel’s painting "Bogatyr".

Originally titled "Ilya Muromets," the painting was painted by M.A. Vrubel incredibly quickly, within a couple of weeks, with virtually no preliminary sketches or outlines. In form the painting was the usual traditional rectangle. Pointed at the top in the form of a huge, heavy triangular spear, it received later. In general, the picture reflected the most monumental and daring ideas of the artist.

Writing his "Bogatyr" Vrubel began with the head of the horse, for which he was looking for the right angle of rotation. A real Russian crowbar like its rider, whether under its load it sagged and hooves went into the ground, or whether it grows from the depths of Mother Earth, feeding on its forces, embodying its power. Somewhere far below, pines and spruces grow without reaching my knees, and the enchanted forest can be seen in the background, curving intricately.

The figure of Russian bogatyr is outlined as a huge block, like a massive giant-mountain, forming a single whole with the body of the horse and further - with the forests, fields, earth and sky. The clothes traditionally worn by Russian bogatyrs, recognizable to us, look organically in the combination of colors, tones and lines of the painting’s general background. The Bogatyr’s image organically concentrates the power and might of the land and the people, full of majestic calm and wisdom.

The facial features are not made up for a specific hero of one of the bylinae, they have general, generalized outlines, rather symbolic than individual in nature. The painting as a whole impresses with its titanic fantasy, monstrous power and monumentality. Hyperbolism is expressed in the very approach to the embodiment of bogatyr beginning, in spirituality of nature and national creative spirit. The author himself called his work the music of a whole man, which sounds a hymn to the motherland.