In 1900, Vrubel became member of the World of Art group. The same year, he produced some of his best canvases, including The Swan Princess and Lilac. The Swan Princess was inspired by the opera “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” by Rimsky-Korsakov in which Zabela-Vrubel sang the role of the Swan Princess. Vrubel said that he placed the figure of Tatiana from Pushkin’s poem “Eugene Onegin” in Lilac. Both canvases capture the fleeting atmosphere of twilight and reveal the romantic aspirations of the artist.
The artist's fervent love of nature helped him to convey its beauty. The luxuriant clusters of lilac in the painting Lilac are alive and fragrant in the starlit night. One of Vrubel's contemporaries wrote that nature blinded him (the artist did indeed go blind near the end of his life) because he looked too closely at its secrets.
The lyrical revelation of a landscape as though enveloping spectator colourful маревом, especially impresses in another Lilac - 1901.
This nocturne is not completed by Vrubel. But the magic scales of violet, lilac tones conformably sing a hymn to beauty.
The cool, freshness proceeds from this large canvas. The brush of the foreman is extreme unchained, its each impact is exact. The shades lilac and deep green create surprising mood of calmness, completeness of life.
Because of lilac bushes the laughing head of spirit of a nature, one looks out of with what the ancient myths occupied the world. Even the not written down piece of a canvas with the planned silhouette of a thoughtful female figure sitting on a garden bench, at all does not reduce general impression of harmony and meditation, with which the canvas is penetrated.
