Studio: international art (79.1920)

A RUSSIAN PAINTER : N. K. ROERICH

"THE SACRED LAKE”
BY NICOLAS ROERICH

Besides being a connoisseur, Roerich has
also been an ardent collector of old paint-
ings. He possessed a valuable collection
of these in Petrograd, the fate of which
is unknown, because he would not accept
the high post offered to him by the Bolshe-
viks. His collections also included 75,000
objects illustrating the Stone Age. 0

He does not claim to be the founder of
a school: ever discovering new harmonies
between colour, line, and spirit, he thinks
that every one should wrork out for himself
his own conceptions and technique. 0
The main series that can be traced in
Roerich's paintings (leaving aside his
church frescoes and decorative produc-
tions) are as follow :

(1) The Saints and Legends. Procopius
the Righteous Blessing the Unknown Travel-
lers ; St. Tiron discovering the Sword sent
to him from Heaven, etc. All these paint-
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ings breathe of the power of spiritual calm,
although the heavenly word is nowhere
enforced upon the onlooker : it is only a
characteristic tone in the general harmony
of the composition. 000

(2) The Fascinations of the Stone Age.
To this category belongs the canvas depict-
ing the aborigines in some arctic region
invoking the sun which is a living entity to
them, as well as the one called The Idols—
a shrine the like of which must have
existed in ancient Russia on the top of
many a hill overlooking open vistas.
Another version of this painting contains
a figure of an old initiate shielding his
eyes from the sun and absorbed in the
speaking silence of the distance. This work
was completed in Paris, where Roerich
worked for a year (1900) under Cormon.
Cormon fully realized the untrammelled
bent of Roerich's genius ; encouraging it,