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Dimensions: 71 by 142cm., 28 by 56in.

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, THE NETHERLANDS
The offered lot forms part of a series of canvases painted during the 1890s on the Polenov's estate at Bekhovo on the river Oka. Ranging from quickly executed oil sketches to larger compositions with an almost epic feel such as his 1891 Early Snow (fig.1), they deftly chronicle the effect of the changing seasons on the same stretch of land. These works incorporate the more painterly technique of plein air painting - an approach which he had honed on his earlier travels to the Middle East, and which imbued his art with a more spontaneous and impressionistic quality. Polenov's compositions of this time brilliantly testify to his ability to convey mood within his landscapes, and visually inspire the same range of emotional reaction in the viewer as might be generated by listening to a series of subtly varied chords. His interest in the variations in the weather is clear from the very precise names he gave the works when they were shown at the Moscow Society of Artists in 1893: Sultry, A Light Breeze, Thaw. It was the melancholic Autumn months which especially affected Polenov, as he once confessed to Viktor Vasnetsov he was unable to comprehend how nature could make the landscape burst with so much life during the spring, only to kill it dead in winter.