photo #4398228

The hooked ‘mares’ tail’ form of high cloud known as Cirrus uncinus fill the vault of the sky above a backdrop of pink Cumulus congestus in The Last Rays of the Sun (1903) by Crimean-born artist Konstantin Bogaevsky. Though he often painted fantastical, imagined places and skies that he said came to him in dreams, this painting shows the landscape of Bogaevsky’s native country with a sky that is realistic and familiar to a cloudspotter. He even depicted, with faithful accuracy, the subtle horizontal strips of cloud known as velum that can appear along the flanks of towering Cumulus congestus. ‘In my compositions,’ the artist once wrote, ‘I try to convey the image of this Earth – majestic and beautiful, solemn and sad.’The Last Rays of the Sun (1903) by Konstantin Bogaevsky is in the collection of The M. Kroshitsky Sevastopol Art Museum in Sevastopol, Crimea, a territory of Ukraine occupied by Russia.