Book of Wisdom 1924

Nicholas Roerich made this painting – it's called Book of Wisdom – sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, and it's done with oil on canvas. I love the way that Roerich layers tones and colours to build this landscape. Look at the blues and purples in those mountains. The overall effect is not about detail but a kind of mood, an atmosphere. It makes me wonder, was he painting from memory, or imagination, or both? Roerich had a long and interesting life – he travelled through Russia, Europe, and India, and so you get the sense that he's trying to capture not just a specific place, but a feeling. The figure of the monk, in their red robes, gives us something to focus on in the foreground, but I think the true subject of this painting is the landscape, the vastness and mystery of the mountains. It reminds me of other landscape painters like Ferdinand Hodler who were interested in the monumentality of nature, but with maybe a touch of the symbolic.