February Azure

February Azure (Февральская лазурь, also known as February Blue, is a landscape painting by Russian post-impressionist painter Igor Grabar, created in 1904. The painting was presented to the public at the second exhibition of the Union of Russian Artists, which opened on 31 December 1904 in Saint Petersburg and then moved to Moscow in February 1905. In 1905, February Azure was purchased from Grabar by the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow after a unanimous decision of the museum's board of directors.

Grabar considered February Azure a sum of several separate, lengthy observations—in a sense, a synthesis of them—and a revolutionary work that opened up a new path Russian art had not explored until then.

Studies and background
At the first exhibition of the Union of Russian Artists in 1903, Grabar became acquainted with one of the participating artists, Nikolai Meshcherin. Meshcherin invited Grabar to stay at his family estate on the bank of the Pakhra river in Moscow. Grabar, being eager to paint snow and winter, accepted the invitation—he liked winter landscapes because he regarded snow as an ideal basis to use many different lighting effects on. The Meshcherin family owned the Danilovskaya factory and were wealthy and hospitable. Grabar felt home at their place. They provided him with a sleigh with a carriage to travel around the area for his studies. During one of his usual wanderings near the estate in February 1904, he encountered "something extraordinary going on in nature. [...] a feast of azure skies, pearl birches, coral twigs, and sapphire shadows on the lilac snow", which impressed him deeply enough that he decided to embody it in a painting.

Grabar first painted a study on a small canvas, then took a larger canvas and worked on another study for the next three days on the same spot. Both studies survived: the first one, titled Winter, is stored in the collection of the State Russian Museum under the inventory number Ж-2219 in Saint Petersburg, and the second, titled February Azure, is kept in the National Art Museum of Belarus in Minsk.

Afterwards, he dug a trench more than 1 m deep in the snow, in which he settled down with an easel and a canvas mounted on it so he could get an impression of "a low horizon and the celestial zenith, with all the gradations of blue from light-green below to ultramarine at the top". He had prepared the canvas beforehand in the studio, covering it with a dense layer of lead white in varying tones. The daily work lasted for two weeks, uninterrupted and entirely in situ. Grabar recalled that, fortunately for him, the snow did not melt during the period as the weather stayed cold. He worked under an umbrella, and with the front side of the canvas turned towards the sky so that the sunlight reflected on the snow did not fall on the painting—which would have affected his perception of the colours on it.

Descriptions


The title describes the composition's essence effectively, as the painting depicts the intense colours of the sky on a cold February day. Most of the painting's foreground is occupied by a birch tree with branches that are, according to art historian Olga Podobedova, "rhythmically arranged (ритмически расположенными)" and shining either white or golden against the sky background. Grabar himself noted their rhythmic structure in his Automonograph. The top of the tree cannot be seen as it is cut off by the upper edge of the canvas. Art historian Natalia Mamontova compared the branches to "wings" and observed that the red crowns of the trees are genuinely impressionistic, whilst the painting's vertical format (142.6 cm × 84.8 cm or 56.1 in × 33.4 in) heightens the plasticity of the birch and gives prominence to "the infinity of the azure space (бесконечность лазурного пространства)". Behind are other, thinner birches, and on the horizon is a birch forest streaked with light in some distance. The snow in the foreground shows the shadows of the trees behind the viewer.

Grabar wrote in his Automonograph that, although March Snow (Мартовский снег, 1904) seemed more popular among other artists than any other work he produced during his early years, he felt that February Azure was more significant and integral because it was a sum of several different, lengthy observations and, in a sense, a synthesis of them, and believed that February Azure opened up a new path Russian art had not explored until then.