Snow peaks. The Caucasus

Snow Peaks — The Caucasus belongs to the concentrated series of mountain studies that Kuindzhi produced in his later years, treating the Caucasus range as a subject requiring systematic pictorial attention. Snow-covered peaks had been a defining subject of European Romantic painting, from Turner's Alpine studies to Segantini's Engadine canvases, and Kuindzhi brought this tradition into Russian landscape painting with a rigour and chromatic intensity that distinguished his approach. The Russian Museum holds this work as part of its comprehensive survey of his late production, which remained largely unknown outside Russia until the twentieth century.

The painting employs a close-value approach in the snow passages, with subtle distinctions between warm-sunlit and cool-shadow surfaces. Kuindzhi's paint application in these mountain studies tends toward smooth layering in the sky and more textured work on the physical surface of the peaks.