Taking a Snow Town

"Taking a Snow Town" (1891), held at the Russian Museum, depicts the traditional Siberian folk festival game of storming a snow fortress — a boisterous winter entertainment in which teams on horseback and on foot compete to take or defend a constructed snow wall, with all the roughhouse energy and communal joy that the event involves. Surikov had grown up in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and witnessed the game as a child, and he returned to his hometown to paint it directly from life, with real participants in the actual event. The painting is unique in Surikov's work for being a genre scene rather than a historical painting, though it carries the same monumental scale and pictorial ambition as his historical canvases. The snow fortress, the charging horseman, the crowd of spectators, and the wild winter energy of the scene give Surikov a vehicle for his remarkable ability to paint crowds and movement. The work celebrates a specifically Siberian folk tradition at a moment when the distinctiveness of regional Russian culture was a subject of considerable artistic and intellectual interest.

The composition centres on the mounted horseman crashing through the snow wall, surrounded by a dense crowd of spectators and participants. Surikov uses the white of the snow fortress and snow-covered ground as the dominant compositional element, against which the figures' clothing and the horses provide colour accent. The dynamic, off-balance energy of the charging figure contrasts with the ordered crowd.