Evening in Ukraine

Kuindzhi first painted this Ukrainian evening in 1878, and it belongs to the one thing that obsessed him, light. The son of a poor family in Mariupol, he made his name by chasing effects other painters thought unpaintable, the exact glow of a low sun or a full moon. Here white peasant huts and cherry trees climb a hillside, and the whole slope is soaked in the deep crimson of a southern sunset, the walls almost burning where the light hits them. He kept coming back to it, reworking the canvas into the early 1900s to push the colour further, thickening and simplifying the tones until the scene reads almost like a stage lit from one side. That hunt for pure luminous colour is what made his fame, and it is on plain view in these glowing white walls.