The North

The North is an oil on canvas painted in 1879 by the Russian landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi; it is in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (inventory 881).

Kuindzhi showed the picture at the seventh exhibition of the Peredvizhniki (Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions) in Saint Petersburg in 1879, together with Birch Grove and After the Rain. The exhibition opened on 23 February, but Kuindzhi's canvases were not ready and went up two days later; Ivan Kramskoi wrote to Pavel Tretyakov that the public received them with enthusiasm, and Tretyakov bought all three straight from the exhibition for 6,500 roubles. The North is regarded as the closing, farewell work of a trilogy on northern nature that Kuindzhi had begun with Lake Ladoga and On the Island of Valaam earlier in the decade.

In a tall canvas of 132 by 103 cm, the viewer looks down from a rocky height, with a few pines clinging to the stones in the foreground, over a plain of forest and meadow cut by a winding river. The land fades into mist and merges at the horizon with a smoky grey sky, which fills well over half the picture. The signature and the date 1879 are at lower left. The vantage point from above, with the gaze directed down towards the earth, is a device Kuindzhi used repeatedly, and the Tretyakov Gallery's magazine places The North among his works in a plein-air, impressionistic manner, in contrast to the stylised, decorative treatment of Birch Grove painted the same year.

The Samara Regional Art Museum holds an oil sketch associated with the painting, Forest Distances, on cardboard mounted on canvas, 36 by 55 cm. The finished picture has been read as an image of the boundless spaces of the northern lands, austere but treated with evident affection.