The Gauja Valley

Jūlijs Feders painted the Gauja Valley in 1891, and for Latvians it became something bigger than a view of a river bend. Feders had trained far away at the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, where he specialised in landscape, and he first showed this canvas there. But it was Latvia he came back to paint almost every summer, and this stretch of the Gauja, the country's longest river winding through wooded slopes, turned into one of the defining images of the national landscape at a time when a Latvian sense of self was just taking shape. The Riga city museum bought it in 1921, three years after Latvia became an independent country.