The Nightingale Sings

"The Nightingale Sings" (1923), held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is a late Nesterov work painted in the difficult years following the Russian Revolution, when his world — the Russian Orthodox Church, the cultural institutions of Imperial Russia, the social fabric his art had addressed — had been radically disrupted. The nightingale, a bird famous for its song rather than its appearance, is a subject that Nesterov approaches as an exercise in the communication of invisible things: the beauty of music through visual means. Nesterov had spent his career trying to paint the ineffable — the quality of spiritual experience, the presence of the sacred in landscape and human face — and the nightingale's song offered a related challenge. The Metropolitan Museum's acquisition of this work demonstrates Nesterov's continued international reputation even through the political upheavals of the early Soviet period.

The composition would present the challenge of making a singing bird — an acoustic rather than visual phenomenon — the expressive centre of a visual work. Nesterov likely approaches this through the quality of absorbed listening in any figures present and through the atmospheric landscape setting that serves as the resonant space of the song. The handling reflects his characteristic silvery palette and contemplative mood.