Winter

The impressive winter landscape once adorned the apartments of Emīlija Benjamiņa, the millionaire owner of the most popular newspaper “Jaunākās Ziņas”. However, during Soviet times the Benjamiņš house was the home of the Writers’ Union and in 1954 the organisation gave the painting to the State Museum of Art (now the Latvian National Museum of Art). The important landscapist’s painting was often on show in exhibitions of Latvian art abroad – Brussels, Kaunas, Kiev, Luxembourg, Leningrad, Moscow and Tallinn. Special note must be made of the fact that the painting represented Latvia at the 2007 exhibition “Masterpieces of European Art” dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the European Union. In Rome’s Palazzo del Quirinale, the painting was among works by such world famous stars as Titian, Dürer, Rodin, Turner, Čiurlionis and Edelfelt. The playful sparkle of reflections the sun and clouds on a cold, sunny winter’s day, the plastic curvature of the “S” shaped dark waters and the silhouette of the huge trees in the foreground supplemented by the fragile lacework of branches marks the composition as one of the most expressive examples of Art Nouveau in Latvian painting.