Moonlight night. Zdravnevo

In 1880 the painter Arkhip Kuindzhi showed a single picture in St Petersburg, a moonlit night on the Dnieper, in a room with the windows curtained and an electric lamp trained on the canvas, and crowds came to see the moon glowing off the river. Ilya Repin, whose subject was nearly always people, seldom went near it, and this is one of the rare romantic night scenes in his work. He painted it in 1896 at Zdravnevo, his summer estate on the Western Dvina near Vitebsk. The woman on the bank, her back to us and her eyes on the moon's track across the water, is his daughter Nadezhda. The dog at her side, muzzle lifted as if he were looking too, is the family's Pegas. The canvas stands about 143 centimetres tall, a portrait's upright format for a night landscape.