Tolstoy's Backyard

In the early 1900’s, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was commissioned to take a photo survey for Tsar Nicholas II. This painting is based on his 1912 photograph of a field and birch forest in Western Siberia. I was attracted by the composition of the photograph: the path in the field leading to the distant trees.  I was also attracted by the color. 
Prokudin-Gorskii developed a technique of taking color photographs although color film did not yet exist.  Using color-filtered plates of glass, he captured a red, a blue and a green channel of an image. He then presented these images in color slides using a light-projection system. Many of these fascinating images are available on the Library of Congress website.

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