Palestine landscape 1885

Vasily Polenov created this landscape of Palestine in the late 19th or early 20th century, though he left the precise date unrecorded. Polenov was part of a generation of Russian artists drawn to the Holy Land, seeking to depict biblical scenes with greater historical and geographical accuracy. The Russian Orthodox Church, a powerful institution in Tsarist Russia, encouraged such artistic endeavors, viewing them as a means to strengthen faith and national identity. But Polenov's painting, with its seemingly objective depiction of the landscape, also participates in the orientalist tradition that saw European artists turning to the East for inspiration. Here the visual codes of landscape painting are deployed to suggest the timelessness and unchanging character of the region, an idea that has a history of obscuring the complexities of its social and political realities. Understanding this work requires consulting travel accounts, religious texts, and studies of Russian cultural policy in the late Imperial period. Such resources allow us to understand the complex intersection of faith, politics, and artistic vision in Polenov's Palestine landscape.