Moonlit Night
Місячна ніч
A nocturne painted at Ge's own khutir Ivanivskyi in Chernihiv gubernia, sometimes catalogued as Moonlit Night. Farmstead. It belongs to the small group of Ukrainian landscapes in which the moralist of the Passion cycle let himself work as a pure romantic of light.
Image: reproduction sourced from art.biblioclub.ru. The work itself is in the public domain.
Related Works
Portrait of the Historian Mykola Kostomarov
Ge's portrait of Mykola Kostomarov, the Ukrainian historian and Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood member who had taught him at the First Kyiv Gymnasium. Critics have long counted it, with the Saltykov-Shchedrin portrait, among his most intellectually charged likenesses.
What Is Truth? Christ and Pilate
Painted over his earlier canvas Mercy, this is Ge's most notorious late work: a shadowed, exhausted Christ confronted by a Pilate standing in full light. Its refusal of any idealised Saviour outraged church and academy alike and the picture was withdrawn from exhibition.
Dawn. Khutir Ivanivskyi
High-resolution, unwatermarked alternative from the same Khutir Ivanivskyi landscape series, in case the watermarked 500 px 'Moonlit Night' is unusable.
Portrait of Nataliia Petrunkevych
One of Ge's last works, painted at Ivanivskyi: the daughter of his Chernihiv neighbours stands reading by an open window with the twilight garden behind her. The full-length format and the dissolving green half-light make it the most lyrical portrait of his Ukrainian years.