Isaak Levitan: Lyrical Landscape

Isaak Levitan (1860-1900) was born into a poor Jewish family in Lithuania and was able to enrol at the Moscow School of Painting in 1873. He made rapid progress, the great merchant collector Pavel Tretyakov buying one of his paintings when he was only nineteen. In 1886 Levitan sketched in the Crimea and from 1887 he spent several summers painting in the Volga region. These years saw the development of his great friendship with the future playwright Anton Chekhov and the creation of his first 'mood landscapes'. Levitan travelled extensively, if briefly, in Europe, visiting Berlin, Paris, the Riviera, Italy, Switzerland, Munich and Vienna. He was thus, unlike many of his contemporaries, well aware of artistic trends in the west, his experience of European art adding to the breadth of his vision. In both his joyful commemorations of the Russian spring and his quiet scenes of fields and forests, lakes and rivers, often seen at twilight, Levitan employed simple, well-loved motifs of the Russian countryside, an expressive brushwork and a subtle tonality. His work was greatly admired by Diaghilev, the revolutionary theatre manager Stanislavsky and the great operatic singer Chaliapin. Towards the end of his short life Levitan, exhibiting with the Wanderers (the Russian association for travelling exhibitions) and the Munich Secession, was responsible for revitalising the teaching of landscape in Moscow. This revised edition of the author's Isaak Levitan Lyrical Landscape (2004 and 2006), also focuses on Levitan's still lifes, portraits and cityscapes. The creative thinking behind some of his most outstanding works is explored and certain parallels are drawn with the landscapes of Monet, who, while Levitan painted on the shores of the Volga, lived and worked near the river Seine. AUTHOR: Averil King is an independent art historian with a particular interest in the art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her previously published books are Isaak Levitan Lyrical Landscape, 2004, re-issued 2006, Newlyn Flowers: the Floral Art of Dod Procter, RA, 2005 (both Philip Wilson Publishers), and Paula Modersohn-Becker, 2009 (Antique Collectors' Club).