Untitled Picture (Deluge)

Kandinsky first painted the Flood on a pane of glass in 1911, and by 1913 the subject had grown into Composition VI, the canvas nearly three metres wide that now hangs in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. This picture carries the date 1914, so the Deluge was still occupying him a year after that canvas was finished. Its title gives away little. It is called simply an untitled picture, with the Flood added in brackets, and the museum's catalogue lists no subject tags beyond the Blue Rider itself. It is a sizeable canvas in oil, a little over a metre high and 1.4 metres wide.