The artist Alexander Kuprin created the painting Bakhchisaray. Twilight in 1928. In the painting, we can see an old Crimean town: narrow streets, low houses surrounded with green trees, the old Khan’s palace, and the minarets of the mosques. On the horizon, we can see the outlines of the mountains.

The artist chose a low-key palette that conveys the twilight: various shades of purple, green, and brown. The sky looks pale; the mountains are covered with a light haze. The light of the setting sun touches the tops of the Lombardy poplars.

The composition is arranged in a way that makes the outlines of the buildings look in harmony with natural shapes. In the horizontal plane, the rounded lines of the Khan’s Palace rhyme with the curves of the mountain ridge. The ensemble of vertical lines is formed by the houses in the foreground, the sharp minarets and the crowns of the poplars.

Alexander Kuprin was a member of the Jack of Diamonds society of artists that was formed in 1911. Among other members of the group, there were Ilia Mashkov, Aristarkh Lentulov, Petr Konchalovski, Mikhail Larionov and other artists of those times. They were inspired by the French Cubism, Fauvism, and Post-Impressionism artists, especially by Paul Cézanne.

Kuprin’s early works were still life paintings in the Cubism style. His most famous works in that style are Still Life with a Pottery Jar and Still Life with a Pumpkin.

In 1917, the Jack of Diamonds group fell apart. Some years later, Alexander Kuprin fell sick, and the doctors advised him to change the climate. For several years in a row, Kuprin spent the summer in Crimea where he painted a whole series of Bakhchisaray landscapes. The series also included Bakhchisaray. Rocks in a Russian Settlement, Bakhchisaray. Noon and Bakhchisaray. Evening. Churuk-Su River.

Since 1930, Kuprin also painted industrial landscapes: factories of Moscow and Dnepropetrovsk, oil field of Baku. Before the war, the artist switched to the landscapes of the central parts of Russia, and later, returned to painting Crimean cities, Feodosia and Gurzuf.