Landscape with a red cloud

In the summer of 1913 Konrad Magi went to the Estonian island of Saaremaa, hoping the sea air and the local mud cures would ease his failing health. He was one of the first modern painters Estonia produced, and on the small island of Vilsandi he worked fast and close to his lodgings, not roaming for grand views. This is one result: a stretch of land under a sky where a single cloud burns red. The paint sits in small dense touches of electric blue, sharp green and sudden orange, so the scene reads more as felt colour than as a place you could name. Magi was 34 that summer. He would keep painting these charged northern landscapes until his early death 12 years later.