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Vasily Perov, 'Accompanying the Deceased', 1865

 


Desperately slow progress is conceived by one of the most prominent Russian realist painters of the mid nineteenth century, Vasily Perov. His oeuvre exploited the plight of the peasant in a variety of situations, yet perhaps surprisingly themes were still widely accepted by the conservative, Russian academy. In telling the story of the Russian peasantry, Accompanying the Deceased is pregnant with the poetry of grief, to use the words of Dmitri Sarabianov. It depicts the dire situation of a peasant family, as they wearily plod onwards into the distance searching for a burial site, a community burial seemingly beyond their meagre means. The skies loom ominously whilst trees deliminate the horizon line, emphasising the difficulties of the Russian landscape. Perov furthers this idea by the harsh, heavy tracks drawn in the snow as the sled is pulled by the exhausted horse. Its arched back and protruding ribs echoes the hunched figure in the front of the the sled, perhaps the only remaining parent of the two children below. One protects the coffin, leaning precariously over it, whilst the other huddles for warmth, hat pulled low, body indistinguishable in swathes of brown clothes. But with the majority of faces and features in the painting difficult to identify, Perov soon depicts not just one family, but the whole of the suffering Russian peasantry. 

The motif of the troika (Russian sled) was a recurring theme in the realism of the mid nineteenth century, and came to represent a stereotypical example of the national idea. Gogol in his Dead Souls expanded this idea, conceptualising Russia as a troika in his writings. Certainly in Perov's work the troika could easily allude to the desperately slow progress towards modernisation in Russia more generally, as well as the backwardness of Alexander II's alleged reforms which, after the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1865, granted little freedom to the peasantry. There was a distinct necessity felt between Russian artist at this time to represent the difficulties of poverty to shine a light on the peasants' desperate situation. This was spurred on by publications, including Chernyshevsky's Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality that espoused an art for mankind's sake and a rejection of purely aesthetic concerns. 

This was not just one of many realist paintings by Perov, but sketches show how he meticulously worked with the position of the horse and sled in the landscape, for different perspectival effects. In the end, he chose to elongate the piece, utilising atmospheric perspective for the surrounding landscape and coupling it with recession to highlight the slow progress of the family. The piece really is one without movement, despite depicting a mode of travel, with its fulcrum occupied by the hunched figure in the centre of the canvas and thus catching the viewer's eye first. Perspective would be a notion that subsequent Russian artists would cling to, including the complicated, multifigure canvases of Surikov, as well as a nod to academic training methods. Couple this with an overwhelmingly earthy palette of mostly browns and Perov has depicted despair in a winter landscape. Any hints at redemption - the green shoots poking through the thick layer of snow, or the black dog attracting our attention to the distant town beyond - is lost when one steps back and takes in the unified whole. Instead, the landscape is transformed into death's domain as the figures seem forever paused in suffering, a snapshot of rural peasant life that Perov has so expertly captured in paint. 

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