The Rooks Have Returned

The Rooks Have Returned (Grachi prileteli) is an oil on canvas painted in 1871 by the Russian landscape painter Alexei Savrasov; it is in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (inventory 828), and is regarded as his best-known work.

In late 1870 Savrasov, then a professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, took leave to work on the Volga at Yaroslavl, where his newborn daughter died in February 1871. In March he travelled into Kostroma Governorate to the village of Molvitino (today Susanino) and made studies there; the inscription at lower left, '1871. S. Molvitino. A. Savrasov', records the place. He went on with the canvas in Yaroslavl and finished it in Moscow in May. The church in the picture is based on Molvitino's late-seventeenth-century Church of the Resurrection, which now houses the Ivan Susanin Museum, though Savrasov shifted the bell tower and made it taller.

The composition is built around a group of birches at the back of a churchyard, where rooks circle and settle on new nests above thawing snow. Behind a long fence lie wooden roofs, the old church with its tent-roofed bell tower, and flat fields with a river in spring flood. Sky fills roughly the upper half; Savrasov used a coloured ground, layered strokes and glazes, and painted the snow in shades of lilac, pink and blue. The canvas measures 62 by 48.5 cm.

Pavel Tretyakov bought the painting in the summer of 1871, reportedly for 600 roubles. It was shown that autumn at the Moscow Society of Art Lovers and then, as The Rooks Have Returned!, at the first exhibition of the Peredvizhniki (Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions) in Saint Petersburg, opened on 28 November 1871, where Ivan Kramskoi judged it the best landscape on view. Empress Maria Alexandrovna ordered a replica, finished in January 1872 and sent to the 1873 Vienna World's Fair; the Tretyakov original went to the Paris Exposition of 1878. Another repetition is in the Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum.