Dairy Maids

This canvas belongs to a cycle of twenty-two works painted before the revolution by Pavel Filonov entitled Entry into World Prosperity. The artist created a series of anti-urbanist pictures reflecting his dreams of an ideal existence in harmony with nature and his concerns regarding the growing anti-humanism of modern society.

Pavel Filonov depicts a typical scene from peasant life, which is contrasted with the terrible destructive force of the city, where all sorts of fantastic events unfold – albeit on a much smaller scale, like in a medieval icon. Dairy Maids is an allegory intertwining the worldly with the religious, combining the everyday with the eternal.