#snow

This shows Czech Legion troops marching into Vladivostok in 1918, deep in the chaos of the Russian Civil War. Luks was usually known for gritty city scenes, not history painting on this scale.

It's said that he photographed sites like this and then rebuilt the scene back in the studio, so what looks grabbed in a single moment was actually pieced together afterward. He ran in the same circles as Van Gogh and, from what I've read, wanted to paint ordinary working people rather than grand subjects.

Tthe model was apparently his own dog — a big white shepherd — and some say it's the same dog painted twice. A couple of years later he was the man doing blue horses and yellow cows; this is just before all that started.

They say he painted this same stretch of river over and over, in every season, because he lived close by — and that a critic once joked his paint was so thick and glittery it looked like crushed jewels.

I couldn't find much on him — apparently he helped start a painters' group back in Rouen, and had a rough life, in and out of hospitals. That's about all there is.

The story goes he told his students to paint the city as it actually was, slush and all, while polite taste wanted prettier things. His crowd got called the Ashcan School for it — which apparently started out as an insult.