Nell'azzurro sconfinato

Rylov painted this in 1918, the first full year after the revolution, with Russia sliding into civil war, cold and hunger. What he put on the canvas is the opposite of all that: a flock of white swans flying low over a bright, wind-driven sea, a small sailing boat below, tall clouds piled up in a clear sky. He had trained as a landscape painter in the old imperial academy and simply kept watching weather and birds. Soviet critics later seized on the picture, reading the swans as a surge toward freedom and renewal, and made it the founding image of Soviet landscape painting. For Rylov it was simpler than that: swans coming back north on a fresh spring wind off the water.