Savrasov was born into the family of a
merchant. He began to draw early and in
1838 he enrolled as a student of professor Rabus at the
Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (graduated in
1850), and immediately began to specialize in landscape painting.
In
1852, he traveled to
Ukraine. Then, in
1854 by the invitation of the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna, President of the
Imperial Academy of Arts, he moved to the neighborhood of
St. Petersburg. In
1857, Savrasov became a teacher at the Moscow School of painting, sculpturing and architecture. His best disciples,
Isaac Levitan and
Konstantin Korovin, remembered their teacher with admiration and gratitude.
In
1857, he married Sophia Karlovna Hertz, sister of art historian K. Hertz. In their home they entertained artistic people and collectors including
Pavel Tretyakov. Savrasov became especially close with
Vasily Perov. Perov helped him paint the figures of the boat trackers in Savrasov's
Volga near Yuryevets, Savrasov painted landscapes for Perov's
Bird catcher and
Hunters on Bivouac.
In the
1860s, he traveled to
England to see the
International Exhibition, and to
Switzerland. In one of his letters he wrote that
no academies in the world could so advance an artist as the present world exhibition. The painters who influenced him most were British painter
John Constable and Swiss painter
Alexandre Calame.
The Rooks Have Come Back (
1871) is considered by many critics to be the high point in Savrasov’s artistic career. Using a common, even trivial, episode of birds returning home, and an extremely simple landscape, Savrasov emotionally showed the transition of nature from winter to spring. It was a new type of
lyrical landscape painting, called later by critics
the mood landscape. The painting brought him fame.
In
1870, he became a member of the
Peredvizhniki group, breaking with government-sponsored
academic art.
In
1871, after the death of his daughter, there was a crisis in his art. The misfortunes in his personal life and, possibly, dissatisfaction with his artistic career were the reasons of his tragedy—he became an alcoholic. All attempts of his relatives and friends to help him were in vain.
The last years of his life Savrasov led the life of a pauper, wandering from shelter to shelter. Only the doorkeeper of the Moscow School of painting, sculpturing and architecture and Pavel Tretyakov, founder of the
Tretyakov Gallery, were present at his funeral in 1897.
