Suvorov Crossing the Alps
Vasily Surikov (1848 to 1916) · 1899
Russian soldiers slide down a sheer wall of ice and snow into a gorge, crossing themselves, laughing and clinging to one another, while the old field marshal Suvorov on a white horse jokes with them from the edge of the drop. The canvas is nearly five metres high and the whole composition plunges downward, so that you look at it as the soldiers look at the abyss. Above them tower the Saint Gotthard Alps in a white light that leaves no shadow to hide in.
Surikov travelled to Switzerland to study the mountains and even slid down slopes himself to understand what the men felt. He deliberately made the descent steeper than any real path could be, because the picture is about faith and momentum rather than topography. Look at the sequence of faces from top to bottom: the young recruit crossing himself, the veteran with a stern grin, the man already tumbling with his eyes shut. The paint is thick and crusted in the snow, thin and grey in the rock, and the small red touches of the uniforms lead your eye down the slope like a rope.
The picture was shown in eighteen ninety nine for the centenary of the campaign of seventeen ninety nine, when Suvorov led his army over the Alps out of an Austrian trap. Tsar Nicholas the Second bought it for the Russian Museum, then only a few years old. Military critics complained that horses cannot stand on such slopes and that bayonets would be sheathed, and Surikov replied that he painted the spirit of the event, not a manual. Notice the drummer boy who has dropped his drum: the smallest figure in the picture is also its heart.
Did You Know? Surikov finished the painting in the same year as the campaign's hundredth anniversary and was proud that he had done so without a single military adviser.
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