Painting and Sculpture

Grandma's Fairy Tales

Grandma's Fairy Tales is a painting by Russian artist Vassily Maximov, completed in 1867. It is held in the State Tretyakov Gallery (Inventory No. 584). The dimensions of the canvas are 67 × 92 cm (68 × 92.6 cm according to other sources). The painting depicts a large peasant family gathered in a village hut on a winter's evening, illuminated by the glow of a luchina, as adults and children listen with rapt attention to a fairy tale being told by their grandmother. Maximov worked on the painting Grandma's Fairy Tales in 1866-1867 and finished it on 27 November 1867. Between the end of 1867 and the beginning of 1868, the painting, under the title Old Woman Telling Fairy Tales on a Winter's Evening, was presented at the exhibition of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, held in St. Petersburg. Maximov's work was well received and awarded its first prize. In December 1867, the artist Apolinary Horawski noted in his critique that Grandma's Fairy Tales was "something that really deserved special attention" and had "special authority." The canvas was purchased by Pavel Tretyakov directly from the exhibition. In 1870, Maximov was awarded the title of class artist of the 1st degree for his paintings Grandma's Fairy Tales, Dream of the Future (1868), Gathering for a Walk (1869) and Old Woman (1869). Art historian Alexander Zamoshkin wrote that in the painting Grandma's Fairy Tales Maximov "created, avoiding any sentimentality, deeply vital images," and that his pictures of peasant children were particularly heartfelt. The art historian Dmitri Sarabianov noted that in this work "for the first time that poetic note sounded," which "will be particularly audible" in Maximov's later canvas A Sorcerer Comes to a Peasant Wedding (1875), while in Grandma's Fairy Tales "the whole scene as a whole focuses on the traditional, patriarchal and therefore beautiful motif."

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸A Young Lady in 1866
• ▸Baluran National Park
• ▸Camille Lemonnier in the Artist's Studio

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.