Sunday (Old Russian)

Sunday (Old Russian), painted in 1904 and held at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, shows Kandinsky returning to Russian peasant life and folk memory—a subject that he engaged throughout his early career as a counter to the urban modernity of Munich. The peasant Sunday, with its church attendance, colourful clothing, and communal gathering, was an image of pre-modern wholeness that Kandinsky found both culturally and spiritually meaningful. His interest in Russian folk art influenced his later development of abstraction, which retained the saturated colour and symbolic intensity of decorative folk traditions.

The work deploys the bright, flat colour areas and simplified forms characteristic of Kandinsky's early figurative work, in which the influence of Russian lubok prints and folk art is visible alongside his Post-Impressionist training. Forms are simplified and outlines are emphasized, anticipating the decorative flattening of his later Expressionist period.