Such a different winter

Winter is still fierce: then snowfalls, then ice, then Epiphany frosts. Apparently, she wants to wrap us in snow, as in the good old days, and freeze us, and decorate everything with frost. How can one not remember the harsh but beautiful Russian winter in the paintings of artists?

Russian winter is perhaps the most vivid, festive and cheerful winter in B. Kustodiev's painting "Maslenitsa" (1916). Just look at this luxury of flowers and the scope of the holiday! White snow gilded by the generous sun, festive red on the skirts of the townspeople, inscriptions, sleighs, a red brick church in the distance. Only yesterday everything was covered with snow, it is still fluffy, not trampled, not worn, loose. I whitewashed everything for Shrovetide. And frost decorated the trees.

The blue-white, sunny winter, captured by I. Grabar in the painting "Luxurious Frost" (1941), both cools and warms at the same time. The icy blue doesn't seem so cold when it's warmed by the gold of the sun. There is only snow here, only thin trees and sky in a lush frost. But how much joy there is when looking at this delicate and fragile luxury! The breeze will blow, the frost will fly off, and this landscape will already be ordinary. The beauty of winter here is in the captured moment, in the luxury of frost, which does not last so long.

Not such a winter and not such a frost in the painting by I. Aivazovsky "Winter landscape" (1876). The gray St. Petersburg winter bursts out from under the brush of the famous marine painter, showering us with cold waves of foggy air. Crowds of people and flocks of birds are dark spots. A sky that makes you shiver. The humid air is colder than usual, so it froze like frost on the branches of trees in the park. But there is no sense of joy and celebration here. There is an element of bone-chilling moisture and cold winter in St. Petersburg.

The scope and beauty of winter among the Russian mountains somewhere in the Urals is about the painting by K. Veshchilova "Winter landscape with fir trees" (approx. 1930). Here the snow fell generously, thickly, it pulls down the paws of the fir trees, it covered these mountains, and this bank of a fast river. Only he did not fall asleep, only she did not submit to winter. She didn't freeze. He runs to himself, and everything around him is drowned in this winter, slightly watered by the evening sun, like pinkish syrup.

A thaw in the middle of winter, when the snow settled, saturated with moisture, when puddles appeared – in the painting by I. Brodsky "Winter" (approx. 1922). It's as if you can smell the wet bark of this tree, the smell of the warm south wind, the smell of hope for spring, which often beckons in central Russia, starting from the end of January. The snow is tired here, it has lived its own life. It has been trampled by both wild and domestic animals, it has lost its sterile color, and in some places it has already gone down. And the horse that came to nibble the grass from under him is already hoping to walk here in the spring.