Ruins of Tiberias

Ruins of Tiberias, painted in 1883 and now in the Rostov Kremlin collection, belongs to the series of studies Polenov produced along the shores of the Sea of Galilee during and after his 1881-1882 Near Eastern journey. Tiberias — the city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee founded by Herod Antipas in honour of the Emperor Tiberius — appears frequently in the Gospel accounts and was a significant city in first-century Jewish life despite Jesus's conspicuous avoidance of it. By the time Polenov painted it in the early 1880s, Tiberias was a small Ottoman town surrounded by the ruins of centuries of occupation: Crusader fortifications, Byzantine structures, and ancient foundations layered over the ancient Herodian city. Polenov's documentation of these ruins served his dual purpose as a plein-air landscape painter and a researcher into the physical world of the New Testament.

Oil on canvas, the painting renders the characteristic appearance of the Galilee lakeshore: the warm basalt stonework of the ruins, the brilliant blue of the Sea of Galilee under the Levantine sun, and the surrounding landscape of limestone hills. Polenov uses the contrast between ancient ruins and living landscape to communicate the layered historical character of the site.