Red Sunset on the Dnieper

Kuindzhi made his name in the 1870s with landscapes that seemed to glow from inside, then in 1882, at the height of his fame, he simply stopped exhibiting and painted in private for the rest of his life. This burning sky over the Dnipro river comes from those late, secretive years in the early 1900s. He was after one thing above all: the effect of intense light, here a band of hot red cloud pressing down on a darkened plain, the water barely catching it. He worked the problem so obsessively that contemporaries wondered whether he hid lamps or coloured glass behind his canvases. The painting reached New York in 1974, when the Metropolitan Museum bought it.