Pure white snow, an endless blue sky, fluffy clouds, and white birch trees in the warm sun – spring seems just around the corner. This typical piece by Igor Grabar, “Winter Landscape” has everything that the artist loved about the Russian countryside. The artist would simply not work on a gloomy day - he needed sunlight in his paintings, in which respect he was quite like the impressionists. A day without sun would make him lament: “Unfortunately, this rainy weather is again in the way of my work. On top of that, and as luck would have it, all my undertakings require sunlight.” “Winter Landscape” is a fundamentally unique painting. By the 1940s-1950s Grabar had already “got over” his past Impressionism, as he admitted: “For old times’ sake, people still called me an impressionist, but in reality, I hadn’t been one for a long time.” And yet this painting is in a way a homage to Impressionism, and a recollection of the time Grabar spent in Paris. It happened in 1897, at the Impressionist Hall of the Musée du Luxembourg. “I felt crushed, swept away, absolutely enthralled,” Grabar recorded in his notebooks. Even though Grabar’s infatuation with Impressionism did not last long, he would always appreciate its “innovative nature.”