“Great Artists” - a collection about outstanding masters of painting. The book series contains more than 50 illustrations, an “elegantly written” biography of the artist and the history of the creation of the paintings.

The fifth album of the collection is dedicated to the work of the largest Russian landscape painter Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi (1842-1910), who is often called the first Russian impressionist. In the early period of his creativity, Kuindzhi was influenced by I.K. Aivazovsky. Already his first paintings - “Tatar Village by Moonlight” and “St. Isaac’s Cathedral by Moonlight” - speak of the artist’s interest in the problems of light transmission. Kuindzhi’s early landscapes, painted in a sparse, hazy palette of colors - “On the Island of Valaam”, “Forgotten Village”, “Chumatsky Highway in Mariupol” - were greeted approvingly by the Wanderers. In 1875, Kuindzhi became a member of traveling art exhibitions, but after a trip to France he decisively broke with them. His writing style became bright and daring. Kuindzhi's canvases literally exploded with colors. He did not copy the Impressionists, but in parallel with them he studied the possibilities of light, color, the influence of the air on objects and shades, and actively experimented with paints. Using lighting effects and intense colors reduced to several main tones, the artist sought to convey the most expressive states of nature in terms of lighting and achieved an almost complete optical illusion of lighting. To achieve panoramic effects in his landscapes, Kuindzhi used various compositional techniques, such as a high horizon. His landscapes “Evening in Ukraine”, “Dnieper in the Morning”, “North”, “Birch Grove”, full of admiration for the beauty and mystery, the variability of the world, stunned the public and brought Kuindzhi wide fame. But Kuindzhi’s main triumph was the painting “Moonlit Night on the Dnieper,” after which the artist “fell silent” for almost twenty years without explanation. Unfortunately, time has not been kind to many of the artist’s canvases (including “Moonlit Night on the Dnieper”), which have lost their original appearance: the colors have faded, their color has changed. The most representative collections of Arkhip Kuindzhi's works are in the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery.