“The Far North, with its gloomy, but powerful and mysterious nature, with its majestic ice and almost perpetual night, has always been calling out for me. A Northerner by heart and by birth, I have been dreaming all my life since my early youth about going up there, beyond the Arkhangelsk Governorate”, Alexandr Borisov, the first Russian artist who visited the Arctic Circle, wrote about himself in the essay “To Novaya Zemlya”.

Alexandr Borisov made his dreams come true when he was a student of the Academy of Arts. He spent the spring and early summer of 1896 in the north of the Kola Peninsula. At the end of the summer, he took a steamer to Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, where he passed through the Matochkin Strait to the Kara Sea. During this time, the artist created dozens of sketches which formed and represented his individual style.

Borisov’s works had great success at the autumn student exhibition in the same year at the Academy. His fellow student Nikolas Roerich wrote that the artist’s sketches, displayed alongside the works of other Arkhip Kuindzhi’s students, “were among the best and attracted everyone’s attention”.

Viktor Vasnetsov considered the sketches “extremely talented, they represent the bright cold horror of the North”. Ilya Repin also gave a good review:

Patron and collector Pavel Tretyakov acquired more than 60 northern sketches for his famous gallery. It was the highest praise for the young painter. “This is a huge success for me, as a student of the academy, it gave me energy, and I began to study the northern nature even more zealously”, he wrote in 1902.

For many years, one of the halls of the Tretyakov Gallery housed a collection of Borisov’s sketches of Novaya Zemlya. Among the photos of them, one can see the sketch, which was transferred to the Tomsk Museum of Local Lore in 1932, and is now displayed in the Tomsk Regional Art Museum. The sketch ‘Valley of the River Matochka in Novaya Zemlya’, painted on August 3, 1896, is regarded by researchers of his works as the best in the series.