Viktor Georgievich Kharlov is a Soviet and Russian painter, monumental artist and teacher. He was born in 1949 in the village of Nikel, Pechenga District, Murmansk Region. Kharlov studied at the Kirov School of Arts. In 1976, he graduated from the Faculty of Painting of the Moscow Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov — he had studied in the class of monumental painting led by Professor Klavdia Alexandrovna Tutevol.

Since 1969, Kharlov has participated in republican, all-Union, regional and international exhibitions both in his homeland and abroad.

In 1973, he traveled to the north of the Kirov region. Viktor Kharlov reminisced about this event: “We managed to see the last remnants of the rural way of life and that spiritual atmosphere that was in small, forgotten villages.”

In 1988, Kharlov was awarded the State Prize named after I.E. Repin for a cycle of paintings called “Rusinov Land”. Viktor Kharlov has been a People’s Artist of the Russian Federation since 2001, a laureate of the International A.A. Plastov award since 2012, and an Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts since 2019. He was awarded the gold medal of the Russian Academy of Arts and the gold medal of the Union of Artists of Russia.

Kharlov participated in the decorative painting of the Assumption Cathedral and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. In 2002, he painted the murals in the Orthodox Church of John the Baptist in Kirov.

Kharlov is an adherent of the traditional Russian landscape and genre school of painting. In his work, he always depicts the life of the Russian province, its peculiarity, spirit and historical uniqueness in an honest and expressive manner. For his paintings, Kharlov chooses not external effects, but complex states of nature.

The place where the artist painted the picture “March. Morning” is located on the border of the Vologda, Arkhangelsk and Kirov regions and the Komi Republic. This is the village of Rusinovo, where the artist discovered the Old peasant Rus with its pristine nature and its patriarchal way of life. In “March. Morning” Victor Kharlov romanticizes nature and shows it as the basis of human existence. The painter draws the viewers’ attention to the beauty of the Russian province and to a small village forgotten by civilization.