Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov, 1862-1942

Both in pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russia Mikhail Nesterov was renowned for his portraits and landscapes. These two genres merge in a number of his paintings, where women are placed in rural settings which are immediately recognizable as quintessentially Russian. The women in question are dressed in traditional Russian clothing.

Winter is a particularly fine example of this trend within Nesterov's oeuvre. This 1910 canvas depicts a woman who stares resolutely ahead, oblivious of the fairytale-like Russian winter landscape against which she is set. The snow-white of the fields merges perfectly not only with the soft tones of the twilight sky, but also with the woman's pale face and faded shawl.

If the central figure in this painting pays no attention to the sparkling Russian winter scene around her, then Nesterov himself consciously stresses its beauty throughout several of his paintings. Just how much Russia's natural splendours meant to him can be inferred from a letter in which he claims to "love the Russian landscape": "against its background one somehow clearer feels the meaning of [...] 'the Russian soul'".

In his canvases Nesterov expressed this thought via the well-balanced "oneness" of his female figures and the surrounding countryside. While painters before him such as Venetsianov had already portrayed Russian peasant women in harmony with a typically Russian rural setting, in Nesterov's works the symbolic implications of this harmony becomes particularly significant: they were painted in a period of vivid public debate over whether Russia itself could be equated to a woman longing for a better future. Nesterov's repeatedly compares Russia to a woman both within his art and in his writings and the depiction of this languishing figure in Winter can certainly be interpreted as the embodiment of Russia's alleged "female soul".