In the Park. Veules-les-Roses in the Normandy

In the Park: Veules-les-Roses in Normandy, painted in 1874, documents Polenov's period of study in France under a scholarship from the Imperial Academy of Arts. Veules-les-Roses, a small Norman coastal village, was the kind of quiet, light-filled location that attracted the plein-air painters working in the orbit of the Barbizon school and the emerging Impressionist movement. In 1874 — the year the first Impressionist exhibition opened in Paris — Polenov was absorbing the new approaches to outdoor painting that would transform his work and, through him, the direction of Russian landscape painting. The Norman park setting allowed him to explore the dappled light effects of sun through leaf canopy and the informal, unconstructed quality of the natural scene that distinguished the new French painting from academic tradition. The Russian Museum's collection preserves this work as evidence of Polenov's French formation.

On canvas, the painting demonstrates Polenov's assimilation of French plein-air technique: broken brushwork to render the flickering of light through leaves, a lighter and more varied palette than Russian academic convention permitted, and an informal compositional approach that frames the scene as if encountered rather than arranged. The greens of the Norman summer vegetation are rendered with chromatic richness.