Sunday (Old Russian) (sketch)

In 1903 Kandinsky was in Moscow again, and he wrote to Gabriele Münter that he had a completely strange feeling there, hundreds of memories, images half forgotten. Back in Munich the following year he painted the old Russia of costume and legend, knights on horseback and churchgoers gathered on a Sunday in front of a walled town with domes. The subject exists in three versions. The finished oil, 95 centimetres wide, is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and he also cut it as a small woodcut. This is the sketch, and it is hardly smaller than the final picture, the same long low strip, close to 90 centimetres across and under 40 high. He painted it in oil and gouache on jute, a coarse, loosely woven fabric.