Evening in Ukraine

Evening in Ukraine is an oil on canvas by the Russian landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi, painted in 1878 and partly repainted by him in 1901; it is in the State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg (inventory Zh-4190).

Kuindzhi first showed the picture, simply titled Evening, at the sixth exhibition of the Peredvizhniki (Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions) in 1878, alongside his Forest. Its composition recalls his Ukrainian Night of 1876: once more a hamlet of whitewashed clay houses on a hillside, but now the walls glow not under the moon but in the last rays of a southern sunset. After 1882 Kuindzhi stopped exhibiting in public, and the reworked canvas was among four pictures he showed only to close acquaintances at private viewings in his home in 1901. The Russian Museum received it in 1914 as a gift from the Kuindzhi Society.

On a canvas of 81 by 163 cm, the houses and the slope are washed in bright pink, while the orchards and trees are massed into heavy, simplified shapes that stand against the sky like a stage backdrop. The museum stresses the sharp contrast of crimson and turquoise pigments, which contemporaries already found more intense than the colours of nature; Ilya Repin recalled that refined critics accused Kuindzhi of choosing moments so harsh they hurt the eyes, yet viewers could not look away. The art historian Vitaly Manin saw the picture as one of the clearest demonstrations of Kuindzhi's method, with detail sacrificed to heighten the effect of light.

The Russian Museum counts it among Kuindzhi's best-known paintings and notes that he produced only a little over twenty large canvases in his whole career. It hangs in the hall devoted to him in the Mikhailovsky Palace.