Birch Grove

Birch Grove is an oil on canvas by the Russian landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi, begun in 1878 and completed in early 1879; this first version is in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (inventory 882).

Kuindzhi had been studying birches since about 1876 and made at least five oil sketches for the composition, most dated 1879, now in the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Nizhny Novgorod art museum. He painted the canvas in his home on Vasilyevsky Island in Saint Petersburg. It appeared at the seventh exhibition of the Peredvizhniki, which opened on 23 February 1879; Kuindzhi was late, and his three pictures, Birch Grove, After the Rain and North, were hung two days after the opening. Ivan Kramskoi reported that the public greeted them with delight, Ivan Shishkin is said to have remarked that one could paint a picture from it, and some visitors believed a rumour that it was painted on glass and lit from behind. Pavel Tretyakov bought all three straight from the exhibition for 6,500 roubles.

The canvas, 97 by 181 cm, shows a forest clearing flooded with sunlight and closed off at the back by a dark wall of trees. The crowns of the birches are cut off by the top edge, leaving trunks, white where the sun strikes them and greenish-brown in shade, and a few branches of fresh leaves bright against the dark forest. A duckweed-covered stream and a gap between the distant trees divide the composition in two. Kuindzhi built the effect from a few flat zones of colour and sharp contrasts of light and shadow; Vladimir Stasov wrote that he struck notes of intense lighting that no one had yet tried.

Kuindzhi later painted two vertical versions: one of 1881, sold at Sotheby's in 2008 for $3.065 million, and one of 1901, now in the National Art Museum of Belarus in Minsk.