Petersburg. Crossing the Neva.

The Neva River crossing at St. Petersburg in winter — with ice floes, freezing conditions, and the city's imperial architecture as backdrop — offered Aivazovsky a subject that combined his river-and-ice painting interest with the cultural significance of Russia's imperial capital. This 1870 oil on canvas, now in the Kyiv National Picture Gallery, depicts what appears to be a winter crossing of the Neva, where the frozen or partially frozen river created both an obstacle and a temporary roadway for those crossing between the city's banks. St. Petersburg winters were extreme, and the Neva's freezing was an annual event of considerable practical and cultural significance — the city's life reorganized itself around the river's state. Aivazovsky, primarily associated with the Black Sea and warm-water subjects, showed with works like this one that his atmospheric command extended equally to cold, northern winter conditions.

The composition uses the broad expanse of the Neva as a foreground dominated by ice in various states — solid floes, thin ice, open water between — with St. Petersburg's waterfront architecture defining the distant shore. Aivazovsky adopts a cool, desaturated winter palette of grey-blues, pale greens, and muted whites. Figures crossing the ice provide scale and narrative to an otherwise abstract field of frozen water.