Isaac Levitan: 135 Landscape Drawings & Paintings (Annotated)

Concise, essential and annotated by Raia Iotova, this Art Book contains annotated reproductions of Isaac llyich Levitan landscape drawings and paintings, date and interesting facts page below.

Isaac llyich Levitan (1860 -1900) was a classical Russian landscape painter who advanced the genre of the "mood landscape". Isaac Levitan's hugely influential art heritage consists of more than a thousand paintings, among them watercolors, pastels, graphics, and illustrations.

Levitan's work was a profound response to the lyrical charm of the Russian landscape.

Characteristic of his work is a hushed and nearly melancholic reverie amidst pastoral landscapes largely devoid of human presence. Fine examples of these qualities include The Vladimirka Road, 1892 Evening Bells, 1892, and Eternal Rest, 1894. Though his late work displayed familiarity with Impressionism, his palette was generally muted, and his tendencies were more naturalistic and poetic than optical or scientific.

Isaac Levitan was born in a shtetl of Wirballen, Province of Kowno in Lithuania (then in the Russian Empire) into a poor but educated Jewish family. At the beginning of 1870 the Levitan family moved to Moscow. In September 1873, Isaac Levitan entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture where his older brother Avel had already studied for two years. After a year in the copying class Isaac transferred into a naturalistic class, and soon thereafter into a landscape class. Levitan's teachers were the famous Alexei Savrasov, Vasily Perov and Vasily Polenov. In 1875, his mother died, and his father fell seriously ill and became unable to support four children; he died in 1877. The family slipped into abject poverty. As patronage for Levitan's talent and achievements, his Jewish origins and to keep him in the school, he was given a scholarship. In 1877, Isaac Levitan's works were first publicly exhibited and earned favorable recognition from the press. After Alexander Soloviev's assassination attempt on Alexander II, in May 1879, mass deportations of Jews from big cities of the Russian Empire forced the family to move to the suburb of Saltykovka, but in the fall officials responded to pressure from art devotees and Levitan was allowed to return. In 1880 his painting Autumn day Sokolniki was bought by famous philanthropist and art collector Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov. In the spring of 1884 Levitan participated in the mobile art exhibition by the group known as the Peredvizhniki and in 1891 became a member of the Peredvizhniki partnership. During his study in the Moscow School of painting, sculpturing and architecture, Levitan befriended Konstantin Korovin, Mikhail Nesterov, architect Fyodor Shekhtel, and the painter Nikolay Chekhov, whose famous brother Anton Chekhov became the artist's closest friend. Levitan often visited Chekhov and some think Levitan was in love with his sister, Maria Pavlovna Chekhova. In the early 1880s Levitan collaborated with the Chekhov brothers on the illustrated magazine "Moscow" and illustrated the M. Fabritsius edition "Kremlin".

In 1897, already world-famous, he was elected to the Imperial Academy of Arts and in 1898 he was named the head of the Landscape Studio at his alma mater.

Levitan spent the last year of his life at Chekhov's home in Crimea.