Nicholas Roerich painted this work in India in the middle of the Second World War – one of the most dramatic periods in the history of Russia. The picture belongs to a series of works dedicated to Russian national history, heroes and saints, in which the artist expressed his own reflections on modernity and concerns for the sake of his former homeland. The canvas is based on a real subject – the heroic campaign of Prince Igor of Kiev against the Polovtsians – and the images of Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, mounted by Sergei Diaghilev in the early 1910s in sets designed by Roerich. Prince Igor's foot-soldiers emerge from the mighty walls and turrets of the city of Kiev. The sharp silhouettes of the figures and the rhythm of the lances and religious banners against the bright yellow sky, in the middle of an eclipse, evoke feelings of alarm and predestination. This sensation is increased by the suggestive tones and patches of blue-violet and dark-red on yellow.

Roerich Nicholas

Roerich, Nicholas (Nikolai Konstantinovich)
1874, St Petersburg -7, Kullu (India)
Painter, theatrical designer, writer. Studied under Arkhip Kuindzhi at the Imperial Academy of Arts (1893-97), Faculty of Law, St Petersburg University (1893-98) and Fernand Cormon''s studio in Paris (1900-01). Academician of painting (1909). Contributed to exhibitions (from 1895). Contributed to the exhibitions of the World of Art (1902, 1903, 191 1-17; founding member 1910; chairman 1910-13), Union of Russian Artists ( 1903-10; member from 1903), Salon d''Automne (1906, 1907; member from 1906), Exposition Universelle in Paris (1900), World Exhibition in St Louis (1904), International Exhibitions in Munich (1909), Rome (1911, 1914) and Malmo (1914) and the Exhibitions of Russian Art in Paris (1906-08), Berlin (1906) and Vienna (1908). Director of the School of Drawing, Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (1906-16). Designed for theatres in Moscow and St Petersburg and Sergei Diaghilev''s Saisons Russes (from 1907). Emigrated (1918). Settled in Kullu in India (1928).