Roerich is often called “the poet of stone”. His resort to the stone Ancient Russia, to its fortress architecture is the origin of his artistic predilections. With a great accuracy of reproducing architectural monuments, expressiveness is also present in the Roerich’s sketches. Accentuated contours and the local color give a special sharpness and expressiveness to the historical monuments.
In this sketch, Nikolay Roerich painted the entrance to the Kremlin in Rostov the Great: the extremely simple, smooth rounded walls of the Kremlin and the calm an upward slenderness of the well-proportionate church. The Rostov Kremlin stands as a majestic and elegant stronghold.
The Roerich’s architectural sketches, painted after his journey through ancient Russian towns, were first shown in 1904 at an exhibition in Saint Petersburg. Contemporaries called the architectural Russian series by N. Roerich “a pantheon of the former glory of Russia”, “a stone chronicle of Russia”. In the same 1904, seventy-five sketches of this series were sent to an exhibition in the United States, among eight hundred works of Russian artists. Due to the bankruptcy of the exhibition organizer, all the paintings were sold at auction.
And now, many years later, forty-two sketches of this series returned to the motherland. An American friend of Roerich, Mrs. K. Campbell-Stibbe, according to the will of Nikolay Konstantinovich, gathered these paintings and transferred them in 1976 to the artist’s homeland at the request of his son, Svyatoslav Roerich.