This painting became for contemporaries a symbol of the coming social changes. It conveys the “spirit of the times.” “I had three versions,” the artist later recollected. “In the process of working I set out more and more demands from the purely painterly side which would even out the form and content, the things which would give the painting social importance.” The artist managed to combine the traditions of Russian icons, early Italian frescoes and neo-Classical traditions. The cold colours of the water and the rounded lines of the shore literally “propel” the wonderful “fire-like” horse forward and it seems that he is no longer in the painting but here just in front of it. The art researcher D.V. Sarabyanov, analysed this painting and wrote the following: “The symbol is …very capacious. It has something of Blok’s “mare of the steppes” in whose image was formed….the past of Russia, its difficult present and that infinite, imperishable thing that remains forever.”