Hammerfest. Northern lights

Hammerfest. Northern Lights, painted in 1894 and held in the Tretyakov Gallery, documents Korovin's journey to the Russian Far North with the writer Konstantin Nemirovich-Danchenko as part of a cultural expedition sponsored by Savva Mamontov, the great Russian arts patron. Korovin traveled along the Murman coast and to the Norwegian Arctic town of Hammerfest in 1894, producing a series of works depicting the stark light conditions of the northern polar region — including the aurora borealis, a phenomenon unlike anything in the southern Russian or European landscape. The Northern Lights subject pushed Korovin's color sensibility into uncharted territory: the aurora's shifting greens and violets over dark Arctic water had no precedent in the plein-air or Impressionist tradition he had inherited. The painting is considered one of the founding works of a northern Romantic tradition in Russian art and remains one of Korovin's most frequently reproduced images. Mamontov's Abramtsevo circle, in which Korovin was a central figure, was a major driver of the Russian art revival of the 1890s.

The aurora borealis required Korovin to work with colors outside his usual warm palette: the spectral greens and violets of the lights are set against the darkness of the arctic sky and the cold reflective surface of the sea below. He applies paint in broad, luminous strokes that capture the diffuse, non-directional quality of the aurora's illumination rather than the crisp directional light he more often handled.