The Polovetzky Camp

The Polovetzky Camp, dated with an uncertain year and held at the Detroit Institute of Arts, depicts the nomadic culture of the Cumans (Polovtsy), the Turkic nomadic people who occupied the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea during the eleventh through thirteenth centuries and were one of the major external forces shaping the history of Kievan Rus. The Cumans appear repeatedly in Russian medieval chronicles as both enemies and occasional allies, and their relationship with the Rus principalities was a defining feature of the period that fascinated Roerich. The subject has literary resonance through the Lay of Igor's Campaign, the medieval Russian epic poem that describes a disastrous Rus raid into Cuman territory in 1185 and its aftermath. Roerich was drawn to this borderland world where nomadic steppe culture met Slavic forest civilization.

Oil on canvas with the spatial organization characteristic of Roerich's steppe paintings, in which the enormous horizontal extent of the nomadic landscape dwarfs the human figures within it. The tent camps of the Cumans are rendered with the archaeological specificity he brought to all his historical subjects.