Also conducive to the young artist’s joyful mood was the environment he moved in, the friends he associated with, and the creative atmosphere that prevailed in Abramtsevo, the country estate of Savva Mamontov, the famous patron of the arts. This remarkable house in the picturesque Moscow countryside was where many innovations in late 19th-century art were conceived. Serov had stayed here with the Mamontov family for long periods as a child; it was an ideal place for bringing his outstanding talents into play. Amateur theatricals were a favourite pastime in Abramtsevo, and Serov himself played a variety of roles. Under the benevolent guidance of his elders – Repin, Victor Vasnetsov, Vasily Polenov – and the beneficial influence of communion with his coevals – Vrubel, Korovin, Mikhail Nesterov – the young Serov’s gift for painting blossomed and matured. It was also here that he came to love the central Russian landscape, the rural scene, the homely peasant horses, and the plain peasant faces.

      Another haven of refuge for the young artist was Domotkanovo in Tver province, the country estate of Vladimir Derviz, an Academy friend who had married one of Serov’s cousins, Nadezhda Simonovich. Serov spent many happy days here, lulled by the unhurried rhythm of rural life, inhaling the musty smells of autumn and admiring its even, grey hues.

      The joyful mood which Abramtsevo and Domotkanovo engendered in Serov helped the artist create his most significant early pieces. Almost all of Serov’s works of this period, from the studies of the mid-1880s to the masterpieces, the Two Girls and Overgrown Pond, painted at about the same time in Domotkanovo, are imbued with the same feeling. Serov immerses himself, as it were, in the beauty of the world, his colours are saturated with light and air, soaked by the sun, and radiating joy. He contemplates this beauty with quiet admiration. Each picture is long in the making; he has his models pose for long hours, yet what is revealed on canvas is the very first impression of what he sees.

      The model for Girl with Peaches was Mamontov’s twelve-year-old daughter Vera, who sat for the artist in Abramtsevo, for Sunlit Girl, the artist’s cousin Maria Simonovich in Domotkanovo. The two girls turned out to resemble one another, but most of the “blame” for that must go to Serov himself who wanted, above all, to see in them the beauty of youth. He sought in these pictures a gentle, contemplative expressiveness. He did not intend the portraits to provoke thoughts on the contradictions and complexities of life, “only the joys of life”. And it is this that sets Serov apart from his predecessors and his teachers. Repin’s portrait of Modest Moussorgsky, done six years before Girl with Peaches, is also suffused with light, but in this case, it only serves to render with the utmost veracity the aspect and condition of the composer going through a terminal illness. Behind the fleeting moment of human existence captured by the artist there looms a world choked by insoluble problems, a world whose only promise to man is suffering and perdition. With Serov, though, light, air, joy, and youth are beautiful per se; they are the ultimate purpose of the creative act, and it is in this above all else that the novelty of Serov’s approach and the originality of his artistic concept manifest themselves.

      The Girls were painted from living persons, yet Serov did not refer to the paintings as portraits or give them the names of the models. This was hardly accidental, because the decisive factor was not the uniqueness of the image, not the individuality of the sitter, but rather Serov’s overall program. In addition, these were not portraits in the customary meaning of the word. Serov’s models are inseparable from their environment. One girl merges into a single entity with the old house and the garden visible through the windows, the other has settled down, as if for good, in the shade of a tree in a sleepy corner of an old, unkempt park. Neither