Ancient-landscape

Ancient Landscape, painted in 1910, belongs to the phase of Roerich's career when he was working most intensively to create a visual world for pre-Christian Russia — a landscape that looked ancient, that seemed to belong to a time before recorded history, that could accommodate the ceremonies, migrations, and conflicts of the prehistoric Slavic world he was imaginatively reconstructing. The prehistoric landscape was a creative challenge requiring the synthesis of his archaeological fieldwork (what ancient settlements looked like), his naturalist observation (what the actual landscape of northern Russia looked and felt like), and his Symbolist artistic sensibility (how to give landscape a spiritual rather than merely descriptive quality). The 1910 paintings represent his most mature response to this challenge before his departure for a life of increasingly international activity.

Oil on canvas with the landscape organization that Roerich had developed through his early study years — a tendency to flatten spatial recession into broad horizontal bands of color, to silhouette forms against luminous skies, and to use color symbolically as well as descriptively.