Putivl 1914

Nicholas Roerich painted this imagined vista of Putivl using tempera, and you can almost feel his hand moving, building this timeless city block by block. Look closely, and you can imagine Roerich’s slow and deliberate process, each dab of paint a meditation. I feel like he’s trying to capture not just the look but the soul of the place. It’s like he’s building a stage set, where the architecture feels both solid and dreamlike at the same time. The colors are muted but intense, like aged frescoes. The umber and ochre sky, the sage green hill, all combine to give a sense of ancientness. I love how he uses line—the black outlines give everything a graphic, almost illustrated feel. It reminds me of the symbolist painters, but with a grounded earthiness. I wonder if he was thinking of earlier Russian icon painters. The soldiers in the foreground look almost like figures in a medieval tapestry. Roerich makes us think about how we carry the weight of history and how we keep reinterpreting it.