Return Yuly Klever (1850-1924)

Description of Julius Clover’s painting "Winter Sunset in the Spruce Forest"

The artist’s expressive landscapes, painted in a realistic manner, mesmerize with the unspoiled beauty of nature and the breath of space.

"Winter Sunset in the Spruce Forest" has become very famous in Russia and abroad. Its reproductions are used in drawings for embroidery, on the pages of calendars. This picture was painted in a series of similar landscapes. All of them had a common feature - this detailed elaboration of the foreground and blurred outlines of the background and distant perspective.

The old firs are frozen in a blanket of snow, there is not the slightest breeze in the silence. The winter forest lurks, waiting for the onset of warmth. In the meantime, only sunlight penetrates through the trunks and serves as a reminder of the distant summer. The frozen brook casts glints of sunlight on the snow and roots of the uprooted tree. The fallen giant has almost completely disappeared under a blanket of snow, but its stubborn roots still reach for the ground in a vain attempt to cling to it.

The rays of the winter sun illuminate the snow-covered space, leaving whimsical shadows on the ground and tree trunks, and enlivening the landscape with a game of shades. Glimmering ice on the surface of a sleeping stream, and a string of centuries-old trees, in some places interspersed with young trees.

Calmness and amazing beauty of nature look from the master’s canvas. The thin strip of clear sky fascinates with its vanishing blue, so noticeable against the white snow. No intentional details, just woods and streams, and the sun peeking through a haze of clouds.

The artist admires the Russian forest, which reeks of eternity and immutability.