The Golden Ring of Russia

The second series is built the opposite way to the first: here the towns are real and the monuments are actual ones. The names are correct and the silhouettes are checked against photographs — and specifically from the vantage point being painted: seen from the water and seen from the square, a building has two different silhouettes.

This is not a formality. Guidebooks retell one another and are systematically wrong: for Rybinsk the written sources gave, one after another, gilded domes instead of dark ones, a dark red exchange instead of a cream-yellow one, and a white stone cathedral instead of an ochre one. Each mistake cost a repainted frame.

What matters for this series is not that a town appears on a list of sights, but how it stands in its own ground: from the water, from below, from a distance, at an awkward hour. The hero is a different one from The Russian Landscape — a modern traveller with a backpack, also seen from behind.

Ready: 2 of 9