1900–1902
oil on canvas
142,3 х 205,3

The picture presents Somov's favourite theme: ladies and a gentleman against a backdrop of grapevine-encircled park galleries. The outline orientation and symmetry of the image turns the park into a stage set. The characters resemble tailor's dummies with frozen mechanical gestures. Nothing is happening in that stage scene, the frozen solemnity turns into "nearly demonic atmosphere of a deadly game", through which the artist is trying and failing to gain a look "into the other side of existence". The picture's colour scheme shows a distortion in the familiar perception of warm and cold tones: the warm tones are fading, the cold are blazing. Gold is extinguished in the lifeless colour of sunset, flickers up a little in the "ice-cold" statue of Dionysius, glows dark on sham gilding of grape bunches. Cold colours show through in the semidarkness lurking in the corners, in the cobweb covering the uva, enhancing their impact in the dress of the sitting lady. It is with sad irony that the artist calls a vision of the past, faithfully reproducing the details of things past, but he understands only too well that it is impossible to breathe new life into it.

at 10, Lavrushinsky Lane, Hall 44