Transportation of Ice

Transportation of Ice (Russian: Vozka lda) is an oil-on-canvas winter genre scene painted by Lev Lagorio in 1849, while he was still a student at the Imperial Academy of Arts; measuring 68 × 96 cm, it belongs to the Irkutsk Regional Art Museum named after V. P. Sukachev.

Born in Feodosia in 1826 to a family of Genoese origin, Lagorio first trained in Ivan Aivazovsky's studio in 1839–40 and entered the Academy in St Petersburg in 1842, studying under Maxim Vorobiev among others. In the 1840s he explored the shores of the Gulf of Finland in his own boat and worked outdoors in winter, and this canvas came out of that practice. The Irkutsk museum notes that, against academic convention, the young painter made a plain genre episode the centre of the picture and rendered unlovely everyday nature truthfully, and that modern scholars rate it as a significant and rare work from the most original period of his career.

The scene shows labourers harvesting ice. At the right, men cut blocks out of the ice; in the middle, a heavy block is being heaved onto a low sledge hitched to a horse, while behind them a cart is pulled by a strikingly small horse. Buildings stand at the left, a tall spruce rises beyond, and in the foreground a boy rides a sled. Alternative titles recorded for the painting include Winter Landscape and Winter View of the Former Wine Town on Vasilyevsky Island in St Petersburg, on the Chernaya Rechka.

The picture once belonged to the collection of Fyodor Pryanishnikov and is listed in the virtual reconstruction of the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, which records its present home in Irkutsk under inventory number Zh-193. The Irkutsk museum states that it was acquired in Irkutsk in 1928. Lagorio went on to graduate with a gold medal in 1850 and became best known for large seascapes and landscapes.