The Fortress Tower at Nizhny Novgorod

The Fortress Tower at Nizhny Novgorod, dated 1903 and now in the Nicholas Roerich Museum in Moscow, belongs to the architectural survey of ancient Russian cities that Roerich undertook in the early 1900s as both artistic and historical research. The Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin — its red-brick towers and curtain walls crowning the confluence of the Oka and Volga rivers — was one of the finest surviving examples of sixteenth-century Russian military architecture, built to defend the city against Tatar raids from the east. Painted on plywood rather than conventional canvas or panel, this work reflects the practical improvisations of field study and suggests that Roerich valued the immediacy of the observation over the conventional material choices of studio practice.

Executed on plywood — an unusual support that may reflect the practical circumstances of outdoor architectural study rather than a deliberate aesthetic choice. The flat, rigid surface would have supported a more decisive, less forgiving application of paint than the flexible weave of canvas.