Traveling through the ancient Russian towns of western and central Russia, N.K. Roerich depicted the monuments of ancient architecture, nowadays partly collapsing or already collapsed. Part of the sketches of the Roerich’s architectural series of is dedicated to the Pskov monuments. Pskov is an ancient free town of the Hanseatic League. The sister town of Veliky Novgorod, in the past it was famous as a trading town and as the Russia’s defender from Lithuanians.

In this work, Nikolay Konstantinovich painted the Pskov Kremlin (kromy (the edges), as it was called by Pskovites), with ancient walls and towers. In the period of the Pskov Republic (14th – early 16th centuries), the Kremlin with its cathedral, veche (popular assembly) square and storehouses was the spiritual, legal and administrative center of the Pskov land.

In 1904, the architectural sketches of N.K. Roerich were exhibited at the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of Arts. The press wrote about these works of the artist: “Yes, indeed, there is much to learn and to see in the sketches of N.K. Roerich; but for this purpose the artist himself or somebody else should think about the appropriate catalog. First of all, it is about the importance of these sketches for the general public: think how dead pages of history with already memorized names will come alive in the minds of at least young students, when, passing through the exhibition, they will see a painted image of that same Pskov, which once rivaled the Hanseatic towns in wealth and trade development, and where the squads gathered to defend the Russian land against the Germans who came from the west”.

(Rus’ Magasine. 1904. January 8/21)