The Demon Downcast

Vrubel finished this in 1902 and then could not stop. When it hung at a Saint Petersburg exhibition that year, he came in every morning before the crowds and painted over it, shifting the demon's broken body, changing the light on the mountains, working the face again and again. Friends watching him grew alarmed. By that spring the signs of the mental illness that would fill his last years were becoming plain, and the picture seemed to change with him. The demon lies crumpled at the top of a peak, wings twisted beneath it, still crowned, its peacock colours catching a cold pink dusk. The Tretyakov Gallery turned it down at first and only bought it in 1908.