Departure of the Soldiers Oil Painting, 1979

A farewell caught in oil — Departure of the Soldiers captures that unbearable pause between love and loss, where romance meets ruin and history holds its breath.

Some paintings you look at, and some you fall into. This one—Departure of the Soldiers—is firmly the latter. It’s a grand, tragic theatre of farewells: soldiers trudging toward the battlefield, one pausing on horseback to kiss his beloved goodbye. You can almost hear the silence between them—the kind that comes right before everything changes.

Her coat, a brilliant brown red, burns through the grey palette like a flare. It’s impossible not to think of that one scene from Schindler’s List—that same jolt of humanity against the machinery of war.

Painted in 1979 by Ukrainian artist Vadim (Demyanovich) Valigura, this monumental canvas (149 × 180 cm) captures, with painful tenderness, what war steals: time, certainty, and the right to stay. Valigura—born in 1941 in the Russian city of Efremov—graduated from the Kyiv Art Institute in 1967 and went on to become a respected member of the Union of Artists of the Ukrainian SSR (and later the National Union of Artists of Ukraine).

A figurative painter with a fascination for human stories, Valigura filled his career with still lifes, portraits, and scenes of everyday endurance—steelworkers, harvesters, mothers waiting by the window. His works sit quietly today in museums and private collections across Ukraine and beyond; each one hums with that particular Soviet melancholy: stoic, beautiful, and slightly bruised.

Departure of the Soldier is not just a painting; it’s a wound in oil—an emotional relic from a world that knew too well the price of duty. We love it for that uneasy contrast: grandeur and grief, romance and ruin. 

A kiss, a goodbye, and the quiet devastation of duty — Valigura’s Departure of the Soldiers paints the moment love salutes history.

A farewell caught in oil | Vadim (Demyanovich) Valigura | 1979

(More pictures will follow soon!)