Focus on In the Ploughed Field: Spring and explore the Reception.
In his book The History of Russian Painting in the Nineteenth Century, the artist and critic Alexandre Benois expressed his admiration for the painting.
The paintings In the Ploughed Field: Spring and At the Harvest. Summer were described as "beautiful" and "deep" by art critic Alexei Savinov, who wrote that "they are distinguished by their remarkable truthfulness, the absence of conventionality in composition, colour, and characterization of images; the people depicted in them live in their own world". In his opinion, Venetsianov was able to "transmit the true poetry of motherhood, to show the charm of a young mother" in In the Ploughed Field: Spring. Savinov praised the artist's skill in this artwork, writing, "by the nobility of his thought, the strength of his feelings, the perfection of execution, this small painting by Venetsianov belongs to the classical heritage of national culture".According to art critic Mikhail Alpatov, In the Ploughed Field: Spring should not be regarded as a typical genre painting; rather, it should be regarded as a "picture song", not a "picture story". As a reason for this, he mentioned the elegant sarafan, the "dancing gait" of the peasant woman across a freshly ploughed field, and the ratio of her height to the size of horses.According to art historian Dmitry Sarabyanov, Venetsianov "was the first to discover Russian nature (in painting)—and above all earth and sky—in natural being and immediately recognised perhaps the most significant aspects". On the one hand, the artist "develops the foreground, writing loosened earth, herbs, stones, leaves," and on the other, "the earth appears to be moving apart to infinity, going beyond the picture field, without being limited on the sides backstage". On Venetsianov's canvas, these seemingly opposing qualities are harmoniously combined, not excluding, but complementing one another.
Mikhail Alpatov Alexandre Benois Russian genre painting Dmitry Sarabyanov sarafan