The original composition The Golden Rooster came to life entirely from the imagination of fine artist Elena Vladimir Baranoff. The painting is centralized around the four main characters of the story and their dynamic relationships: the magical Golden Rooster, the mighty Ruler, the mysterious Queen of Shamakha, and the wise Astrologer. Painted in egg tempera on marble gesso panel, the work of art embodies the fantastical nature of the fairy tale story in a truly original vision of the artist.
The story of The Golden Rooster takes its roots from Tales of the Alhambra, a collection of stories by American-British writer Washington Irving. Irving's magical tale, Legend of the Arabian Astrologer, written during the writer's time living in Granada, Spain at the historic Alhambra Palace, and later published in the United States and England in 1832, inspired Russian poet Aleksander Pushkin to write in verse The Tale of the Golden Cockerel in 1834.
The literary masterpiece served as the muse for composer Rimsky-Korsakov and librettist Belsky to create an opera based on Pushkin's poetry. The opera production first had its world premiere in 1909 in Moscow at the Solodovnikov Theater and the Bolshoi Theater. The London and Paris debuts followed in 1914 and in 1918 the opera opened to a captivated American audience at the Metropolitan Opera.
Inspired by the great works of Pushkin, Irving, and the opera of Rimsky-Korsakov, fine artist Elena Vladimir Baranoff created her very own vision of the mesmerizing tale of The Golden Rooster. It is a story of power, bewitching love, magic and a broken promise.
