Vasily Polenov created his painting Early Snow. Byokhovo after 1891. The artist saw this view one September day looking out the window of the outbuilding on his Borok estate in Byokhovo village. Snow came unexpectedly early that year — trees still had their multi-coloured foliage, late flowers were still in blossom. In a matter of a few hours the golden, full-colour autumn palette was gripped with cold. Autumn and winter overlapped each other, and the artist managed to capture it. He first made a study that later on was repeated on his canvas.
Vasily Polenov deliberately chose a high angle view: from the window of his outbuilding both the distant panorama of the Oka river and the details of the foreground were seen. He painted in detail the young trees and nearby shrubs giving just a general picture of the stretch that lay farther off: the river was lost in the cold horizon, the forest became indiscernible and turned into an aggregation of colour spots. The painting was so good that Polenov created eight versions repeating it. One version was kept by Polenov’s family, another one went to France in 1955, a third one found its way to the Tretyakov Gallery and the rest of them ended up in private collections and museums across the country.
