Red Sunset on the Dnipro

A single point of light burns at the center of this painting, the sun sinking low over the Dnipro River in Ukraine. Arkhip Kuindzhi worked on this canvas between 1905 and 1908, and he was obsessed with one thing above all: how to make light look real on a flat surface. The way the sky glows in bands of orange and deep red, fading into the dark land below, shows why people in his day lined up to see his work. Some viewers even peeked behind his paintings, convinced he must be hiding a lamp back there.

Kuindzhi grew up poor in a Greek family in southern Ukraine and taught himself to paint before finally getting into the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. He had a lifelong fascination with sunsets and moonlight, and here the huge dark cloud spreading across the sky almost swallows the sun whole. Down at the bottom, tiny figures and buildings are barely visible against the shadowed ground, which makes the sky above feel even larger. It is a simple scene, really, but the color does all the heavy lifting.