Explication of the work in the collection of Belgazprombank:

"The painting "The Thaw. Svislochskaya (Belovezhskaya) Forest" by Stanislav Yulianovich Zhukovsky, an outstanding landscape painter of the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, is the only work of the artist presented in the corporate collection of OJSC Belgazprombank. The work is dated 1935 and refers to the last, Warsaw period of life and the creativity of the painter.

After the revolutionary events of 1917 in Russia, Stanislav Zhukovsky, whose art, by virtue of its belonging to the landscape genre, was always out of politics, became, like many other representatives of the creative intelligentsia, the victim of a gross interference of politics in his destiny. The harsh attacks of Soviet critics, who branded the famous landscape painter a “singer of noble life”, “completely divorced from modernity”, “a living dead”, who is “outside the circle of real art and real artists”, comparing his works with a “tradable commodity”: “street beauty”, in fact, forced Zhukovsky to emigrate. The last straw in the artist's decision to leave was the removal of his works from exhibiting at the exhibition of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions that opened in April 1923. This incident was especially offensive for Zhukovsky, since he exhibited regularly with the Wanderers, starting in 1896 - from the time he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

In autumn 1923 the artist moved to Warsaw. He lived in Poland until the end of his days, continuing to work in line with realistic landscape painting, combining the immediacy of the image of nature with the penetrating emotionality of its perception, as, for example, in a work from the bank's corporate collection.

The painting was painted as a result of one of Stanislav Zhukovsky's creative trips to Belovezhskaya Pushcha, the views of which invariably inspired the artist. The northern part of this unique forest area, located on the territory of the modern Grodno region, is the remnant of a relict primeval lowland forest that grew in Europe in prehistoric times, but was preserved in a relatively untouched state only in the Belovezhskaya region, traditionally called Svislochskaya Pushcha, which was reflected and in the title of the canvas: “Thaw. Svislochskaya (Belovezhskaya) Pushcha.

In his “Thaw…” Stanislav Zhukovsky masterfully captures a brief, transitional state of nature, when the cold of winter recedes, and it is replaced by a timid feeling of approaching spring. On the canvas, as in the famous poem by Fyodor Tyutchev:

The view of the earth is still sad, but the air is already breathing in spring,

And the stalk that is dead in the field sways, and the branches of oil stir.

Still nature has not woken up, but through thinning sleep

She heard spring and involuntarily smiled at her...

The motif of the landscape is simple: a straight, snow-covered, but already melted and cut with deep black ruts road cuts into the body of the forest in a sharp triangle-wedge, goes into its depths. The snow still lies in the shade of the fir trees, alternating with brown tussocks of last year's withered grass, but its days are short. There are puddles of melt water in deep ditches by the road, and dark trunks of still bare trees and bushes are reflected in their asphalt-gray, slightly gleaming surfaces. The sky, swollen with lead blue near the horizon, is already high in spring. It seems that a little more, and next to the whitish clouds, a piercing gap in its blueness will open, filled with bright sunlight. Depicting the moment between what is and what is about to happen, Stanislav Zhukovsky strives to convey the very essence of the processes taking place in nature, which is slowly awakening from a deep winter sleep.

The painting retains the freshness of the direct impression of the forest landscape seen by the artist on a gray day of thaw, when the humid cold air envelops trees and bushes, dissolving the clarity of their outlines and hiding details. Zhukovsky combines this amazingly visually conveyed “truth of vision” with the emotional interpretation of nature, giving the work a generally minor mood, but also filled with bright expectations and hopes.

Acquired from a private collector from Belarus in 2015, earlier - at one of the auctions in Poland."