Taking a Snow Town

Almost everything Vasily Surikov painted was Russian history on a grand, tragic scale. This is his one big exception, and it came out of grief. In 1888 his young wife died, and the painter, badly shaken, took his daughters back to his native Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. There he watched again a game he had known as a boy, a Maslenitsa contest at the close of the pre-Lenten week, where a rider charges a fort built of snow and ice while defenders beat at the horse to turn it back. He painted the exact instant a rider bursts through the crumbling wall in a spray of snow. Working on it seemed to bring him back to himself. He finished the canvas in 1890 and showed it with the Peredvizhniki in 1891.