Winter day by Pavel Fedotov

Among the many cases and plans, a tiny picture “The Winter Day” flashed and lost, in essence, nothing more than a sketch quickly made right out of the window, with the addition of two figures that were swiftly sketched, but still characteristic: one of them, , designated Druzhinin, the other, on the sidewalk of the line Twenty-first, noticeably stooped and baggy, with a bundle of papers in his hands – the artist himself.

Is it not significant that he, though inadvertently, casually and obviously not giving serious meaning to what he has done, returned to what he had once begun to mimic his nature to his first “experience,” and again wanted to capture the “empty view before the windows” ? A long, boring fence with a gate, and behind it in the distance roofs of buildings and a few trees – a tiny, mediocre motive, and it is inconceivable to imagine that even one of the recognized landscape painters of the time was tempted by it.

Fedotov was not a landscape painter, he was deceived, and with an astonishing perceptibility he passed the special state of the Petersburg winter day, his damp-frosty air, his sky glowing through an invisible veil, and the very drowsily withered morning duskiness, imperceptibly turning into evening twilight.

But Fedotov’s hour did not strike, and the landscape did not take possession of him, and he himself brushed aside involuntarily jumped out from under his hand – wrote and then friendly presented to Druzhinin.