A person’s happiness is based on their ability to identify with nature, to notice it and communicate with it.
L.N. Tolstoy
The landscape Sunny Day belongs to Levitan’s earliest preserved works, with which he presented himself at the exhibition of painting students in 1877, at the age of seventeen. The scenes, colors, scents, and sounds of the village had a strong echo in his young artistic soul, inspiring him to create this brightly colored work, filled with a multitude of details.
Savrasov, known as the creator of the lyrical landscape style, asked his students to “look for the intimate, incomprehensibly touching, and often melancholic characteristics that are strongly felt in domestic landscapes, and which elicit an overwhelming response in our soul”. This will be the guiding principle of Levitan’s entire oeuvre.
As a member of the progressive group of 19th-century Russian artists, known as the Peredvizhniki, he became one of the best Russian landscape painters. Levitan’s speciality Ivan Shishkin made a great contribution to painting through the creation of the so-called “mood landscapes” achieved by his masterful control of colors, light, and shadow. In his works, the representation of light and the relationship between light and shadow are vital, similar to Monet or Sisley, although Levitan was more of a realist than an impressionist.
As a realist who found inspiration in real life, especially in nature, which he deeply felt, he was aware that the human mind can never fully penetrate its secrets. He wrote: “Is there anything more tragic than feeling infinite beauty all around, observing hidden mysteries, seeing God in everything, and being unable to adequately express all these powerful emotions due to our own incompetence?”
At the student exhibition in 1880, Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov, one of the founders of the famous Tretyakov Gallery, purchased Levitan’s painting “Autumn Day. Sokolniki,” which was the first official recognition of his talent.
Levitan’s attitude towards nature and his poetic approach to painting emphasized the spiritual and emotional connection between the artist and his subject. In many ways, his style resembled the approach to written word of his close friend Anton Chekhov, as well as other giants of Russian literature such as Pushkin, Gogol, and Turgenev. An art historian wrote that his paintings exude the freshness of the morning from Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches and the scent of haymaking from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. He particularly excelled at capturing subtle changes in nature during the changing seasons and different parts of the day. He loved painting autumn the most, and thus painted over a hundred autumn landscapes, the most famous of which is Golden Autumn. His love for nature is present in each of his works, and he himself noted: “Russian nature is beautiful, emotional, sad, harsh, unpredictable, tender, spiritual, and so magnificent.”
In his work, he aimed, as he admits, for each brushstroke to represent an expressive word. His greatness is evident in his incredible ability to awaken deep human emotions with his landscapes. “Painting is not a protocol, but an explanation of nature through the means of painting,” that is how he understood the essence of visual arts.
While his early works were more lyrical in nature, depicting nature in all its beauty, later they became imbued with philosophical and psychological undertones. Although his canvases mostly lack human figures, the lyrically intonated landscapes metaphorically represent psychological states and speak of human emotions and aspirations. In the painting “Above Eternal Peace,” the artist’s reflections on the transience of life and human destiny come to the forefront. Symbolism is emphasized in the painting “Solitary Monastery,” where only a rickety bridge serves as a connection to the outside world.
While Levitan’s earlier works were more intimate and lyrical, his mature art takes on a philosophical character, expressing his contemplation of man, the world, and the transitory nature of everything. This is most evident in the painting “Behind Eternal Silence,” where a solemn silence prevails and nature stands immobile in its primordial grandeur. Time It’s as if time stood still above the lonely lake and the cape with a church and a cemetery, and only a faint ray of light reminds us of the brevity and transience of human life in the face of eternal, magnificent nature. Levitan wrote to Tretyakov: “This painting represents me entirely, my psychology, my whole being.”
When in 1879 Jews were forbidden to live in Moscow, Levitan was forced to withdraw to a village near Moscow. Although it was one of the most difficult periods of his life, he did not stop painting. It was there that Oak Forest was created, as well as Autumn and other works. Fortunately, thanks to influential friends in artistic circles, he returned to Moscow at the end of that same year.
Following that were years of recognition. Levitan’s reputation spread throughout Europe during the 1890s, and he actively participated in the artistic life of Russia and beyond. He taught at the Moscow School of Painting, participated in exhibitions across Europe, and became a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts.
However, in 1897, an illness was discovered. He had a curable heart disease. Although this lover of painting and nature did not reduce the intensity of his work, the end was looming. In that last period of life and work, a change in style was noticeable. The landscapes became extremely refined, increasingly filled with light and mysterious tranquility, so much so that some critics called them “wordless poems”.
These paintings showed the influence of old Russian art, but also the modernism that was emerging in French painting at the time, which attracted Levitan. However, he did not join the modernist approach, but remained true to realism.
During this period, numerous paintings of quiet sunsets, moonlit nights, and sleepy hamlets were created. “I have never loved nature as much as I do now, or been so sensitive to it,” he wrote in a letter to Chekhov, who said of these paintings that ordinary everyday things acquire special meaning on them, and silence becomes loud.
He spent the last, 39th year of his life with Anton Chekhov’s family. way to Crimea.
He intended to name his last great painting “Russia”, but changed his mind and named it “Lake”. Russia. The magnificent power of Russian nature is condensed in that painting: vast water and land expanses, blue sky, wind driving large clouds, white silhouettes of churches… He was unable to finish that painting.
Levitan worked on the painting “Birch Grove” for four years, trying to capture the most elusive moments in nature. He strived for every brushstroke to be an expressive word. Hundreds of brushstrokes were transformed into leaves and blades of grass. The level of depth is extraordinary. The grove is permeated with light, pulsating with life, and one can almost feel nature breathing.
Levitan’s nature studies seem to represent an tireless search for archetypal images, especially his works depicting river motifs. Although he celebrates the beauty of Russian nature and its vast expanses, his paintings go beyond objective representation of nature, infused with deep philosophical meaning, and his aspiration to reach the sublime. There is something profound and unattainable in her. In his paintings, nature is something grand and eternal that surpasses human comprehension.