Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi was a masterful landscape painter. He was born near Mariupol, in the Karasu district, in the family of a poor Greek shoemaker. Since childhood, he painted a lot, and one of his friends advised him to go to Crimea to the famous artist Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky. In 1865, Arkhip Kuindzhi decided to enter the Academy of Arts. There, the artist met Ilya Repin, Ivan Kramskoy and other Wanderers.

Arkhip Kuindzhi was close with scientists, he knew the chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev and the physicist Fyodor Fomich Petrushevsky well.

From 1894 to 1897, Kuindzhi headed the landscape workshop at the Academy of Arts, and brought up a whole galaxy of talented students who became established artists: Konstantin Bogaevsky, Nicholas Roerich, Arkady Rylov, Alexander Borisov, Vilhelms Purvītis, Konstanty Wroblewski, Yakov Brovar, Grigory Kalmykov, Nikolaos Himonas, Yevgeny Stolitsa, Victor Zarubin, Mikhail Latri, Ferdynand Ruszczyc, Arkady Chumakov, Maria Pedashenko, Petr Vagner, Anton Kandaurov, and Viktor Bondarenko.

The romantic canvas “Moonlit Night” housed in the National Art Museum of the Sakha Republic demonstrates the artist’s method: by using light effects he achieves an almost naturalistic illusion. The dark, velvety, southern night seems to reign in nature, enveloping everything with a warm cover. Only the moon, beckoning with its secrets, disposes the viewer to philosophical thinking, evoking musical and poetic associations.

“The illusion of light was his god, and there was no artist equal to him in achieving this pictorial miracle. Kuindzhi is an artist of light, ” Ilya Yefimovich Repin wrote about him.