The motifs of spring and awakening nature occupy a prominent place in the works of Leonard Viktorovich Turzhansky. In the landscape “Horse Standing Near the Barn”, he conveyed the state of early spring, when the snow is not yet melted but the fresh smell and dewy breath of the earth can already be felt, and the spring sun warms the outskirts of the village with its rays. The artist revisits the subject of life in the countryside, which inspired him throughout his career.

By seamlessly combining landscape and animalier motifs, Turzhansky created a deeply poetic image of the Russian village; the artist believed its beauty to be the true embodiment of Russian nature. The absence of any embellishment of nature in Turzhansky’s painting makes it similar to the works of the Union of Russian artists.

The immediacy of the impression of nature, preserved in its freshness and trembling vitality, fascinated the artist, hence his sketchy, broad manner of painting and the accurate rendering of the world around him. At first, the thick, dense, emotional manner, characterized by distinctly visible strokes, gave the critics the impression of being “rough and unfinished”, as Savva Ivanovich Mamontov put it in 1912.

The landscape’s color scheme is distinguished by the use of a rather limited number of muted colors, which are contrasted to enhance the plein-air effect. These colors make the landscape seem filled with sunlight.

Having started his career at the end of the 19th century, Turzhansky became one of those artists who reinforced the newly emerged trends of Russian landscape painting in the first half of the 20th century — trends that go from the emotional and lyrical perception of the surrounding reality to its pictorial embodiment.