Isaak Levitan: Lyrical Landscape (2011)

31cm x 23cm. Oblong hardback. This is the only western study of the renowned Russian landscape painter, Isaak Levitan (1860–1900). Now into its third edition, it has been further enhanced by new images and extra chapters. Born into a poor Jewish family in Lithuania, Levitan was able to enrol at the Moscow School of Painting aged only thirteen. He made rapid progress, the great merchant collector Pavel Tretyakov buying one of his early paintings. In 1886 he sketched in the Crimea, and from 1887 he spent several summers painting in the Volga region. Levitan’s paintings commemorate the arrival of the Russian spring and celebrate the quiet beauty of her rivers and lakes, fields and forests, which are often pictured at twilight. In doing this he sought simple, well-loved motifs of the countryside, using an increasingly refined and laconic technique. His work was greatly admired by Diaghilev, while his lifelong friend Anton Chekhov spoke of its ‘astonishing simplicity and clarity’. Indeed, Levitan’s later compositions have a mystical quality achieved by few other artists. Before illness claimed him at the age of 39, Levitan was able to make brief journeys to Berlin, Paris, the Alps, north Italy, Munich and Vienna. His awareness of painterly developments in Europe was to some extent reflected in his own art. Towards the end of his life he was responsible for revitalising the teaching of landscape painting in Moscow and exhibited regularly with the Munich Secession.