クリミアの山中で

Vasilyev painted this in Crimea in 1873, sent south to the coast because tuberculosis had wrecked his lungs and his doctors hoped the warm air might save him. He was in his early twenties and already talked about in Russian art circles as a prodigy. The picture looks up a misty mountain slope through tall pines, the far peaks dissolving in damp light, a landscape he was seeing for the first time and painting mostly from memory and sketches in his rented rooms. It won a prize in a Saint Petersburg competition. He did not live to enjoy much of the acclaim; he died in Yalta that same year, at 23, and this was among the last things he finished.