Konstantin Alexeevich Korovin was one of the most talented and bright artists of the turn of the 20th century. Korovin belonged to a galaxy of artists who in the 1880s–1890s formed a new aesthetic, a new attitude that determined the development of national art in the 20th century. He creatively interpreted the conquests of the Impressionists, forming his own figurative system. He is considered the founder of “Russian Impressionism”, in which Impressionism and decorative art merge together.
In 1875, Korovin enrolled in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Then he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, but after studying there for several months and becoming disillusioned with academic teaching, he returned to Moscow and continued his studies at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in the studio of Vasily Polenov.
In the 1910s, Konstantin Korovin began to create paintings, in which the artist snatches moments of happy spiritual fulfilment from the flow of life — depicting the harmony of human life, nature, and the material world. The painting “Winter Twilight” is one of such works.
It was painted by the artist in 1916 in the village of Okhotino, Vladimir Governorate. The motif and style of the “Winter Twilight” are typical for a number of the artist’s works of that period: they are distinguished by the depiction of intimate poetic evenings, where female images often appear alongside still lifes. Women are painted in flowing, shimmering dresses, their figures are shrouded in the warm light of the hearth with reflections of the cold light of the night. The pulse of this world has something in common with the birth of music, and it is not by chance that Korovin called such works nocturnes.
The woman in the “Winter Twilight” looks a lot like the sitter from the portrait of Pertseva by Konstantin Korovin: the same oblong oval face, the same hairstyle, the same shoulder line, elegant arms, and Empire-style dress. She is frozen in complete inactivity; her hand with a pencil is suspended above a piece of paper.
The canvas is painted almost sketchily, with wide, large sweeping brush strokes, and some details are not fully worked out. In the dual lighting technique, which creates contrasting shadows and light and is traditional of Korovin’s nocturnes, romance lives in the unconcealed decorative nature of the color palette, which may have been inspired by the theater.
