1910s
Paper, water-colour, pastel, coal
69,7 х 97

The story was borrowed from the Ancient Greek myth about the Thracian singer Orpheus and his wife Eurydice. The work is a vivid illustration to one of the seminal pages of the Silver Age art: the artists' work for the theatre. A signature feature of the theatrical scenery of the early 20th century is the desire to bring about a marriage of arts, to achieve a fusion of painting and music on stage. The work represents a scene of Eurydice being mourned, having been taken before her time. Her tomb is situated in a secluded grove of laurels and cypresses. The outlines of figures and trees are transformed into a pattern and joined suing a linear rhythm, to convey dying movement in the recurring postures and wavering contours. The artist interprets the stage as the primordial image of the underworld of Hades and his wife Persephone. The dull cool colours, the figures of wailers resembling pale shadows seem to offer a foretaste of Elysium, the world of departed souls. The image created by Golovin was congenial to the artists of The World of Art, whose work features the theme of antiquity as an echo of a culture long gone.