"Moonlit Night on the Dnieper" (1880) is one of the most famous paintings by Arkhip Kuindzhi. This work made a splash and gained mystical fame. Many did not believe that the light of the moon could be conveyed this way only by artistic means, and looked behind the canvas, looking for a lamp there. Many people stood in silence for hours in front of the painting, and then left in tears. Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich bought "Moonlit Night" for his personal collection and took it everywhere with him, which had sad consequences.
What kind? This is what we will find out now …
In the summer and autumn of 1880, during a break with the Itinerants, A. I. Kuindzhi worked on a new painting. Rumors about the enchanting beauty of "Moonlit Night on the Dnieper" spread throughout the Russian capital. For two hours on Sundays, the artist opened the doors to his studio, and the Petersburg public began to besiege her long before the completion of the work. This painting has gained truly legendary fame. I. S. Turgenev and J. Polonsky, I. Kramskoy and P. Chistyakov, D. I. Mendelev came to the studio of A. I. Kuindzhi, the famous publisher and collector K. T. Soldatenkov asked the price. Right from the studio, even before the exhibition, "Moonlit Night on the Dnieper" was bought for huge money by the Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich. And then the painting was exhibited in St. Petersburg. It was the first exhibition of one painting in Russia.
The work was exhibited in a separate room of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists on Bolshaya Morskaya. At the same time, the hall was not illuminated, only a bright electric beam fell on the picture. This made the image even more "deepened", and the moonlight became simply dazzling. And decades later, the witnesses of this triumph continued to recall the shock that the viewers who “got” to the picture experienced. Exactly the "got" - during the exhibition days Bolshaya Morskaya was densely packed with carriages, and a long queue lined up at the doors to the building and people waited for hours to see this extraordinary work. To avoid the crowd, the audience was allowed into the hall in groups.
Roerich still caught the servant Maxim alive, who received rubles (!) From those who tried to get to the picture out of turn. The artist's performance with a solo exhibition, moreover, consisting of only one small painting, was an unusual event. Moreover, this picture did not interpret some unusual historical plot, but a very modest landscape. But A. I. Kuindzhi knew how to win. The success exceeded all expectations and turned into a real sensation.
A. I. Kuindzhi was always very attentive to the exhibiting of his paintings, he placed them so that they were well lit so that they would not be disturbed by neighboring canvases. This time "Moonlit Night on the Dnieper" hung on the wall alone. Knowing that the effect of moonlight will fully manifest itself under artificial lighting, the artist ordered to drape the windows in the hall and illuminate the picture with a beam of electric light focused on it. Visitors entered the dim hall and, spellbound, stopped before the cold glow of the moonlight. A wide space stretching into the distance opened before the audience; the plain, crossed by the greenish ribbon of a quiet river, almost merges at the horizon with a dark sky covered with rows of light clouds. Above they parted a little, and the moon looked out through the formed window, illuminating the Dnieper, huts and a web of paths on the near bank.
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And everything in nature became silent, bewitched by the wonderful radiance of the sky and the Dnieper waters. The sparkling silvery-greenish disk of the moon flooded with its mysterious phosphorescent light the earth immersed in night peace. It was so strong that some of the spectators tried to look behind the painting to find a lantern or lamp. But there was no lamp, and the moon continued to emit its enchanting, mysterious light. The Dnieper waters reflect this light like a smooth mirror, the walls of Ukrainian huts whiten from the velvety blue of the night. This majestic spectacle still plunges viewers into thoughts of eternity and the enduring beauty of the world. So before A. I. Kuindzhi, only the great N. V. Gogol sang about nature. The number of sincere admirers of A. I. Kuindzhi's talent grew, a rare person could remain indifferent in front of this picture, which seemed to be witchcraft.
AI Kuindzhi portrays the celestial sphere as majestic and eternal, striking the audience with the power of the Universe, its immensity and solemnity. Numerous attributes of the landscape - huts creeping along the slope, bushy trees, gnarled stalks of the tartar - are swallowed up in darkness, their color is diluted with a brown tone. The bright silvery light of the moon is shaded by the depth of blue. By his phosphorescence, he transforms the traditional motif with the moon into such a rare, significant, attractive and mysterious that it transforms into a poetically excited delight. There were even suggestions about some unusual colors and even about strange artistic techniques that the artist allegedly used. Rumors about the secret of the artistic method of A. I. Kuindzhi, about the secret of his colors circulated during the artist's lifetime, some tried to catch him in tricks, even in connection with evil spirits. Perhaps this happened because A. I. Kuindzhi focused his efforts on the illusory transmission of the real effect of lighting, on the search for such a composition of the picture that would allow the most convincing expression of the feeling of wide spatiality.
Famous artist Arkhip Kuindzhi, 1907.
And he coped with these tasks brilliantly. In addition, the artist conquered everyone in distinguishing the slightest changes in color and light ratios (for example, even during experiments with a special device, which were performed by D. I. Mendeleev and others). Some have argued for the use of phosphorus-based chemicals. However, this is not entirely true. The decisive role in creating an impression is played by the unusual color structure of the canvas. Applying complementary colors in the picture that reinforce each other, the artist achieves an incredible effect of the moonlight illusion. True, it is known that there were experiments after all. Kuindzhi intensively used bituminous paints, but did not use phosphorus. Unfortunately, due to careless mixing of chemically incompatible paints, the canvas darkened greatly.
Creating this canvas, A. I. Kuindzhi applied a complex painting technique. For example, he contrasted the warm reddish tone of the earth with cold silver shades and thereby deepened the space, and small dark strokes in illuminated places created the feeling of vibrating light. All newspapers and magazines responded to the exhibition with enthusiastic articles, reproductions of "Moonlight Night on the Dnieper" in thousands of copies were distributed throughout Russia. The poet Y. Polonsky, a friend of AI Kuindzhi, wrote then: “Positively, I don’t remember being stuck in front of a picture for so long … What is it? Picture or reality? In a golden frame or in an open window we saw this month, these clouds, this dark distance, these "trembling lights of sad villages" and these overflows of light, this silvery reflection of the month in the streams of the Dnieper, bending around the distance, this poetic, quiet,a majestic night? " The poet K. Fofanov wrote the poem "Night on the Dnieper", which was later set to music.
The audience was delighted with the illusion of natural moonlight, and people, according to I. E. Repin, who stood in “prayer silence” in front of the canvas of A. I. Kuindzhi, left the hall with tears in their eyes: “This is how the artist's poetic charms acted on the elect believers, and they lived in such moments with the best feelings of the soul and enjoyed the heavenly bliss of the art of painting. " The poet Y. Polonsky was surprised: “Positively, I don’t remember standing in front of any picture for so long … What is it? Picture or reality? " And the poet K. Fofanov, under the impression of this canvas, wrote the poem "Night on the Dnieper", which was later set to music.
I. Kramskoy foresaw the fate of the canvas: “Perhaps Kuindzhi combined together such paints that are in natural antagonism with each other and after a certain time either go out, or change and decompose to the point that the descendants will shrug their shoulders in bewilderment: from what came to the delight of the good-natured audience? To avoid such an unfair attitude in the future, I would not mind drawing up, so to speak, a protocol that his "Night on the Dnieper" is all filled with real light and air, and the sky is real, bottomless, deep."
Unfortunately, our contemporaries cannot fully appreciate the initial effect of the picture, since it has come down to our times in a distorted form. And the fault lies in the special attitude to the canvas of its owner, Grand Duke Constantine.
Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who bought the painting, did not want to part with the canvas, even going on a trip around the world. I. S. Turgenev, who was at that time in Paris (in January 1881), was horrified by this thought, about which he indignantly wrote to the writer D. V. Grigorovich: “There is no doubt that the picture … will return completely ruined, thanks to salty air vapors, etc. . He even visited the Grand Duke in Paris, while his frigate was in the port of Cherbourg, and persuaded him to send the picture for a short time to Paris.
I. S. Turgenev hoped that he would be able to persuade him to leave the painting at the exhibition in the Zedelmeyer gallery, but he could not persuade the prince. The moist, salty sea air, of course, negatively affected the composition of the colors, and the landscape began to darken. But the lunar ripples on the river and the radiance of the moon itself are conveyed by the genius A. I. Kuindzhi with such force that, looking at the picture even now, the audience immediately falls under the power of the eternal and Divine.
In fairness, it should be noted that due to the enormous popularity of the painting, Kuindzhi created two more copies of the Moonlit Night, the first painting is kept in the State Tretyakov Gallery, another is in the Livadia Palace in Yalta and the third in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
