Leading Roerich N.K. (Part 6)

A description of Nikolai Roerich’s painting "The Host"

Nicholas Roerich’s work entitled "Leading" shows the important quality that is inherent in wives in the lives of husbands. After all, he dedicated this painting to his life partner, Helena Ivanovna. If you go deeper into the artist’s biography, we know that his wife was for him a kind of mentor in life.

He was a great success, and his wife was a great mentor to him in his life. In addition to science, she devoted most of her life to her husband. Together they went through all the hard trials that fate had prepared for them.

The picture reminds us of an excerpt from a Soviet cartoon. It is as if a character from a fairy tale appeared before us. The blue coloring of the woman, and the clothing of the young man as if he were an excerpt from "The Snow Queen", but this is far from it. The young man’s clothing is typical of the garb of peasants of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The young man, scrambling after his companion, extends his hand to her. She, on the other hand, condescendingly, with her hands on her chest, waits for him with her head slightly bent down. They are in the middle of snowy mountains. This can be understood about the highlands covered with snow.

With this work, the artist highlighted a certain moment from his own life. After all, with his wife, Elena Ivanovna, he went through the mountains of the Himalayas on one of his journeys. And his companion was for Svyatoslav Nikolayevich the support, which is so necessary in the difficult trials of life. After that, the painting "Leading" was born.

The painting was acclaimed in the ’70s, when Svyatoslav Nikolaevich, son of the artist, brought it to the Soviet Union. The first demonstration of it was on the centennial of Roerich’s father.