9 Russian landscapes of Isaac Levitan you must see

Isaac Levitan ventured into different genres, but his talent was fully revealed only in the depiction of nature. Like no other, he conveyed the mood of the notorious Russian melancholy.

Levitan was born into a poor Jewish family in the city of Kybartai in the west of the Russian Empire - now the area is part of Lithuania. Despite their poverty, the Levitans wanted to give their children a better education and moved to Moscow so that Isaac and his brother Abel could study at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. Isaac excelled academically and was even exempted from tuition fees. The boys' parents died shortly thereafter, and they became poor, starved, and even slept at school.

Among the teachers of Levitan were very outstanding painters, and in one of the lessons he was singled out by Alexei Savrasov, known for his lyrical landscapes and, in particular, "The Rooks Have Arrived." Savrasov invited the boy to study in his landscape class, and the very first exhibition of Levitan was a great success, which was almost impossible for a Jew at the end of the 19th century (after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, many Jews were expelled from the capital). However, Levitan managed to finish his studies and from the age of 18, he began to make a living by selling his paintings.

In his story, Isaac Levitan, the writer Konstantin Paustovsky says that Levitan's teachers were annoyed by the Jewish boy's talent for portraying the Russian countryside. “In their opinion, a Jew should not have come close to the Russian landscape. It was the work of indigenous Russian artists. " In any case, Russian landscape was not a particularly popular genre - cityscapes, palaces, and subjects in a historical and biblical setting were what most artists did.

As for Levitan, he liked nondescript fields and muddy roads, rickety bridges, and miniature provincial churches - things that seemed unworthy to portray on large canvases. His "place of power", where he found maximum inspiration, was the Volga River - he created many epic landscapes overlooking the river, especially in the city of Ples with its many tiny churches.

Levitan received real recognition only at the end of his short life - at the age of 37 he became an academician of landscape painting, and at 39 he died in Moscow from an aneurysm of the heart. At that time, an exhibition of his works was exhibited in the Russian pavilion of the World Exhibition in Paris. (Levitan's brother, Abel, also became an artist and professor of arts, and even posed for Valentin Serov for a portrait of his brother).

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