“Studies of the chapel mural” are 14 monumental panels that the artist Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich executed by order of the Moscow merchant L.S. Livshits for a villa in Nice. The panels never got into the chapel due to the events of World War I. The chapel was designed as a place of self-perfection, peace of mind, and spiritual harmony.

On the panel “Cities” Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich depicted a full moon with an anthropomorphic face, and on the second, paired panel, he painted a growing moon. The cities, sleeping under the starry sky without a single living soul, seem enchanted. These images were supposed to evoke a sense of fabulousness in the overall theme of the chapel.

These works represent a more concentrated symbolic appearance of an ancient Russian city. They develop the background theme of the panel “The Master of the House.” The appearance of the city, on the one hand, possesses many fabulous features, on the other — epic ones, expressed in a clear compositional rhythm.

Evgeny Palladievich Matochkin, a researcher of the life and work of Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich, a Russian art historian and professor at the International Slavic Academy, believed that,

The artist’s passion for decorative beauty manifested itself in the color scheme of the “Cities” panels. The rhythmic harmony of the lines, the arrangement of the images in tiers parallel to each other, organically connect the picturesque composition with the architectural environment.

In 1962, “Studies…” and 14 more paintings and graphics by Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich were donated to the Gorlovka Art Museum by Moscow collector and doctor Sergei Alekseevich Mukhin. The doctor had been gathering his collection of paintings and books for decades. Since 1949, Sergei Alekseevich was in correspondence with the writer Elena Ivanovna Roerich, the wife of Nicholas Konstantinovich, as well as with their son Yuri Nikolaevich.