Odessa, le port

Odessa lived off grain. Wheat came down from the steppe by rail and went out through this harbour to Europe, and the port was one of the busiest the Russian Empire had. Kandinsky knew it as a home town. His family had moved there when he was five.

He was 32 when he painted it, and only recently not a lawyer. Two years earlier he had turned down a university teaching post in law and gone to Munich to learn to paint, coming back to Odessa in the summers. In 1898 he showed work publicly for the first time, at an exhibition of the Association of South Russian Artists in the city.

The picture is built from loose separate touches, with the light on the water mattering more than the outlines of the things it falls on. That was the French manner he had been looking at in Munich. It is 65 centimetres across and hangs in Moscow.