Repair Works on the Railway Line Konstantin Savitsky (1844-1905)

Description of Konstantin Savitsky’s painting "Repair Work on the Railway".

Konstantin Apollonovich Savitsky’s work "Repair Work on the Railway" conveys the working atmosphere of ordinary people, the arrangement of everyday life of those years.

In a detached section some excavation work is in progress. More than a dozen people are involved in the construction process. The supplies and tools are fairly primitive at first glance: pickaxe, shovels, wheelbarrow, so people have a hard time. A typical weekday full of labor is all we see on the canvas. In addition, there is a beautiful landscape in the background, from which we can tell that the work is being done in the countryside.

Moving on to a closer examination of the work, we can see that the workers are either repairing something or widening drainage ditches. The characters of the painting are exhausted by their hard work, the viewer often wants to pity them or sympathize with them. The author wanted to demonstrate and accentuate the severity of the work of ordinary peasants.

The place where the artist was inspired to paint his work has long been known: the Kozlov-Zaseka road station of the Moscow-Kursk railroad tracks in Tula province. Savitsky worked all day long on sketches to vividly portray the slave labor of the peasants. The size of the canvas is commensurate with the efforts of the workers - 103 × 180.8 centimeters. Savitsky put as much effort as his characters to recreate what he wanted.

The artist highlights some of the images in the painting: a muscular man with a white scarf on his head, a sullen, mustachioed worker with dark hair, and a very young boy barely able to hold a wheelbarrow in his hands. The gravity of the cargo is indicated by the wheelbarrow lying to the right, which is broken.

At the present time the work, painted back in 1874, is on display in Moscow at the Tretyakov Gallery.