Winter landscape with hut Yuly Klever (1850-1924)

Description of the painting "Winter Landscape with a Hut" by Julius Clover

The artist Julius Klever is descended from an old German family and is the author of many romantic landscapes. Recognizable features of the artist’s work include a peculiar knotty manner of drawing tree branches. Clover mostly recreated winter views of nature on canvases. At the height of the artist’s creativity Romanticism began to gradually recede into the side, giving way to the modernists. Clover’s work was little in demand, although much of his work is undoubtedly very talented.

The artist primarily thought about the beauty of the world he depicts, but he was also interested in the absolute realism of the painted. Fathoming the secrets of landscape painting, Julius tried to find unexplored places, inaccessible to the eyes of the masses, which is why many of his works seem inventive, mysterious, and even fantastic. Clover was especially good at depicting twilight, lit windows, the individual sources of light.

In the picture "Winter Landscape with a Hut" depicts an old log cabin, the chimney of which the smoke comes out. The cabin is lost in the middle of a snow-covered forest; a traveler walking across the snowy plain leans on a stick, but still sinks almost knee-deep in the snow. The tall, lanky trees on either side of the hut stretch vertically upward, their branches, on the contrary, descend to the ground, bending under the weight of the snow. The gloomy, dark, greenish sky is crossed by the beating wings of birds. The darkened upper part of the painting contrasts with the lower part covered in fluffy drifts. The landscape from the canvas looks fantastic, invented and illusory; nevertheless, it’s obvious to the spectator that most of the work was painted practically from nature. The enigmatic Russian North on this canvas appears in all its glory.