Winter

Purvitis painted snow the way other artists painted the sea, over and over, in every light. To get it right he had travelled in 1902 up to Spitsbergen, inside the Arctic Circle, to study how snow actually holds colour. This Winter, from 1910, shows a half-frozen river running between stands of trees in the low evening sun, the shadows on the snow turning blue and violet rather than plain white. Latvia was then still a province of the Russian Empire, and Purvitis was quietly building a landscape that looked distinctly Latvian. For years the canvas hung in the Riga apartment of Emilija Benjamin, a newspaper owner and patron of local artists, before her heirs gave it to the museum.