Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture

24 May 2005 marked the175th anniversary of the birth of one of Russia’s most eminent landscape artists, Alexei Savrasov. Well-loved to this day, Savrasov is most often associated with his masterpiece "The Rooks Have Arrived” (1871). Although this is an outstanding achievement of Russian realist landscape painting, the actual scope and depth of Saurasov’s work is far greater. As early as the 1850s, Savrasov was seen as one of the leading Russian landscape painters. By his mid-twenties, he had produced many wonderful works, most of which played an important part in the development of Russian painting as a whole. Isaak Levitan, Savrasov’s favourite pupil and follower, called his teacher “the creator of the Russian landscape”, claiming that Savrasov’s art brought out the “lyrical quality of landscape painting”, being filled with “boundless love for his homeland”.