Magi procession 1912

This sketchy rendering of a ‘Magi Procession’ was made by Nicholas Roerich, but I don’t know when or with what. Look at those soft pencil lines building up a landscape of gentle rocky shapes! They're so tentative and free, like he's thinking through the image right in front of us. Roerich is feeling his way across the paper, letting the forms emerge slowly, as if he’s discovering the scene rather than inventing it. I get the sense he’s just playing, doodling, letting his mind wander. You see those tiny figures making their way up the slope? They're so small against the vastness of the landscape. The whole scene feels dreamy, almost ethereal, like a memory or a vision. I like how the drawing is unfinished, open-ended. Like, everything is implied but nothing is fixed. It makes me think about how the artist might have been feeling, wandering, and imagining the story as he drew it.