Arkhip Kuindzhi

Arkhip Kuindzhi built a career on a single effect: light that seems to come from inside the canvas. When he exhibited Moonlit Night on the Dnieper in 1880, he showed it alone in a darkened room and charged admission. Visitors queued. Some looked behind the picture for a lamp.

He was born in Mariupol to a Greek shoemaker’s family, orphaned young, and largely self taught. Repin and the Wanderers took him in, though his interest in pure optical effect sat awkwardly with their social realism, and he drifted away from the group.

The experiments with pigment had a cost. Several canvases darkened badly because of the bitumen and chemical colours he used chasing luminosity. He stopped exhibiting entirely in 1882, at the height of his fame, and spent his last thirty years painting privately and teaching at the St Petersburg academy, where Roerich was among his students.