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Russian and Soviet painter and graphic artist, teacher and organizer of art education, Honored Artist of
the USSR, one of the main representatives of the realistic trend in Soviet painting of the 1930s

Since childhood, he showed a talent for painting. From 1896 to 1902, he studied at the Odessa Art
School. Then he moved to St. Petersburg and continued his studies at the Moscow Higher Art School
under the Imperial Academy of Arts. For five years he studied at the Academy with I. E. Repin.

Work on the canvas was completed in 1930. The central place in the picture is given to huge trees.

The branches of the trees bend down to the ground and at the same time reach out to the clear blue
sky, while the trees themselves form a wide alley along which people walk.

Outside, the weather is sunny, the park alley is well lit, but long shadows stretch from the trees. Judging
by these shadows, the time is either midday or afternoon.

Many of the people in the picture are hiding under the trees and busy talking. In the center of the
canvas there are two children, they are busy playing and do not pay attention to others, the viewer does
not see what these children look like, they turn their backs to him and whisper about something among
themselves, which looks quite natural. The alley of the park is quite long, but the viewer does not see
the end of it. The park is quite crowded, most likely, the artist worked on the painting on a holiday or
weekend. An interesting fact is that most of the picture is devoted not to people, but to trees.

One of the researchers noticed that the composition of the painting resembles another work of the
artist — "The Alley of the Park in Rome". This painting was considered lost for a long time, and its
reproduction was published only in a rather rare edition of 1929. With the help of an X-ray image, the
Roman alley that disappeared in a mysterious way was found — right under the Soviet one. The artist
did not clean off the finished image and simply made a number of simple changes to it: he dressed
passers-by in the fashion of the 30s of the XX century, removed the marble statues and slightly modified
the trees. So the sunny Italian park turned into a model Soviet park with a couple of light hand
movements.

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