It's nothing new for artists to make the plainest and commonest of weeds the subject of their paintings - Albrecht Dürer's portrait of a plantain is probably the most celebrated example. Artists who painted the intimate aspect of the Russian landscape often turned their attention to the most ordinary and unassuming plants. Though Ivan Shishkin is best known for large-scale forest landscapes, his attention was caught in 1884 by this miniature forest of goutweed, flourishing in the shelter of a yard fence. Goutweed (Aegopodium podagraria, in Russian snyt') is known to gardeners in America as an attractive ground cover. In Russia, where it grows wild, it is known as a tenacious weed of cultivated ground, notoriously difficult to eradicate. Click on any of the images on this page to see more detail.
Isaak Levitan's Meadow at the Edge of a Forest, on the right, makes the forest a dark backdrop for a luxuriant carpet of wildflowers, using foreshortening to emphasize the flowers over the grass of the meadow. The effect is realistic observation: this is precisely the perspective of a viewer approaching the forest but still at some distance from it.
Even the most extensive landscapes of the Realist school often give clumps of wildflowers prominence in the foreground. Shishkin's Midday. Near Moscow, on the left, is no exception, and Arkhip Kuindzhi's Morning over the Dniepr (1901, on the right) is an extreme example: the whole composition is anchored by a stand of thistles through which the viewer must look to see the distant and virtually treeless landscape. A. A. Myl'nikov's Peaceful Fields, below, is a Soviet labor genre piece from the 1930s which demonstrates the persistence of several of the traditional Russian landscape images: the focus is a group of women agricultural workers striding home at the end of the day, but they are set between a foreground mass of sorrel and yarrow and a distant river, visible in this clip above the tops of the weeds. Click on the clip below to see the whole painting.
