Mountain slope. The Crimea

Arkhip Kuindzhi's 'Mountain Slope. The Crimea' (1887) belongs to his series of Crimean landscape studies — the peninsula's combination of Mediterranean climate, dramatic mountain scenery, and intense southern light making it one of the most distinctive landscape subjects available to Russian painters. Kuindzhi had been making Crimean subjects since the 1870s, and his mature Crimean works achieved the intense light effects that were his most celebrated contribution to Russian landscape painting. The mountain slope gave him a specific topographical subject for his investigation of sunlight on terrain.

Kuindzhi renders the Crimean mountain slope with his characteristic atmospheric intensity — the sunlight on the slope's surface depicted with the tonal contrast that created his famous luminous effects. His technique of building intense light through the careful management of value relationships gives the southern sunlight its particular quality of heat and brilliance. The mountain slope's specific terrain features (rock, Mediterranean scrub, perhaps snow on higher elevations) are rendered within the overall luminous atmospheric quality.