View of the Ice Slides in Moscow during Cheese Week

This late 18th-century engraving takes us to Moscow at Maslenitsa. In the church calendar Maslenitsa, the week before Great Lent, is called Cheese Week, and sliding down hills was one of its traditional amusements.

The plate was engraved by Georg Christoph Friedrich Oberkogler (1774–1809) after an original of 1794 by the French artist Gérard Delabarthe. Delabarthe worked in Russia from about 1787 to 1810 and in the second half of the 1790s produced paintings and watercolours with views of Moscow.

They became the basis for a series of 12 engravings, "Views of Moscow", first published in 1799 by a Moscow merchant of Swiss origin. Besides the ice slides, it included views of the Kremlin, the Kamenny (Stone) Bridge, and Mokhovaya Street with the Pashkov House. Some of the plates were engraved in Switzerland and Germany, and in 1801 the completed series was presented to Alexander I. According to the catalogue, this impression was printed in the Swiss town of Herisau, in etching and line engraving.