When the mouse died, she did so curled on the scrap of canvas where she had first left an indigo pawprint. The sisters buried her beneath a young birch beyond the studio door, laying the mouse’s little body among pine needles and leaves, and then pressed the tiny pawprint painting into the soil as a marker. It rained the next day, and the paint ran in delicate rivers, and when the rain stopped the air smelled of earth and green things.
In the vision, a young woman—Veronika Babko—stood before the same easel, her hair tied in a loose bun, a smudge of cobalt blue on her cheek. She was a painter in the early 1900s, a time when women were often relegated to the background of the art world. Veronika’s dream was to capture the soul of Siberia, a land she had never visited, through the eyes of its most unassuming inhabitant: a mouse. 1st studio siberian mouse masha and veronika babko 184