Sunday (Old Russian)

By 1904 Kandinsky had been living in Munich for eight years, and that same year he was painting beach baskets on the Dutch coast. This canvas looks somewhere else entirely, to an old Russia of the imagination. The Boijmans describes it simply as a historical scene with knights and churchgoers, gathered on a Sunday before a walled town with church domes. Pictures like this were a recurring thread in his Munich years, costume scenes from a Muscovite past, painted far from Russia. A smaller sketch for this one, painted on jute, is now in the Lenbachhaus in Munich. The finished painting is a long, low oil on canvas, 95 centimetres wide and less than half that high, and it came to the museum in Rotterdam in 1946.