Country boys

The 1916 version of country boys, held in the Institute of Russian Realist Art, was painted before Bogdanov-Belsky's emigration, during the First World War — a period when the subjects of peacetime childhood must have taken on added meaning against the backdrop of Europe-wide mobilization and loss. Country boys at play in 1916 were the same generation that would, within a few years, be fighting in the trenches or living through revolutionary upheaval. Bogdanov-Belsky painted them without apparent awareness of this coming catastrophe, or perhaps with a deliberate insistence on preserving an image of innocent rural life against it. The Institute of Russian Realist Art's holding situates this work within a collection devoted to the tradition Bogdanov-Belsky helped define — Russian figurative painting grounded in observed social reality.

Oil on canvas with Bogdanov-Belsky's mature technique fully in command — direct observation still possible in 1916, giving the figures and setting a specific quality that his later émigré work sometimes lacks. The warm palette and naturalistic light of his rural scenes are consistent, but the handling may be slightly more assured than either his early academic work or his late emigre productions.