Rye Fields. A View from the Gate of the Dugino Country Estate to the Kolychevo Village, 1906

The State Tretyakov Gallery

Nikolay Mescherin turned to the same favorite circle of subjects throughout the entire period of his art work. . One of them is the view that opens right from the gates of his mansion. The road among the rye field goes to endless horizon. In the depths of the picture we can see tops of birch trees and roofs of houses, and behind them there are fields with a curved ribbon of the Pakhra River over which on a steep bank a large village with a high bell tower stretches. Mescherin reproduces this characteristic panorama of the central Russia again and again in different seasons, at different hours of a day and under different states of nature. He presents it in the tender green of early summer, and in the gold of a ripe autumn, in summer heat and in the sparkling snow and frosty haze of a short winter day. In all these works the image of a Moscow region landscape acquires a character of a generalized image of the motherland.

The artist Nikolay Mescherin – working mainly in the village – was able to gather around him a whole multitude of artists. His regular guests were Manuil Aladgalov, Igor Grabar, Alexey Korin, Sergey Malyutin, Vasiliy Perepletchikov and Alexey Stepanov. According to Grabar, “all Moscow artists” visited him. Grabar himself lived in Dugino for more than ten years. There he createdthe most famous canvasas, there he worked over his multi-volume history of Russian art. Two workshops were equipped in the mansion in Dugino: one was for the owner and the other one was for guests. Significant collection of paintings by contemporary artists were collected in Dugino.