Rainbow

Arkhip Kuindzhi's 'Rainbow' (1900-1905) is a late work from the painter who had made luminous atmospheric effects his primary subject — the rainbow as the ultimate atmospheric light phenomenon, its arc of prismatic color across the landscape offering the most dramatic of all his investigations of natural light. Kuindzhi had retired from public exhibition for nearly two decades after 1882, working in private and teaching at the St Petersburg Academy, and his late rainbow subject demonstrates his continued formal ambition in the final years of his life.

Kuindzhi renders the rainbow with his characteristic intense focus on atmospheric light effects — the specific quality of the rainbow's prismatic color arc against the dark storm clouds behind it, the way the phenomenon transforms the landscape beneath it through the quality of light that accompanies it, and the specific tonal relationships between the brilliant arc and the surrounding atmospheric conditions all investigated with his sustained observational precision.