Moonrise

Maria Yakunchikova was a Russian painter, printmaker, and textile artist who grew up in a wealthy Moscow family — her father sponsored the construction of the Moscow Conservatory. She studied at the Moscow School of Painting and at the Académie Julian in Paris under Bouguereau, exhibited with the World of Art movement, designed a cover for Diaghilev's magazine Mir iskusstva, and won a silver medal at the 1900 Paris World Fair for an embroidered panel. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis in her late teens and died near Geneva in 1902 at thirty-two. Diaghilev wrote her obituary. Mondaufgang shows a flat field stretching toward a dark treeline, with a large yellow-orange moon rising at center-right, ringed in red against a violet and blue-gray sky. A narrow path or ditch cuts diagonally across the foreground. The paint is fast, loose, and wet — the brushstrokes in the field are visible and rough, and the moon itself is built in thick, hot color.