Isaac
Levitan’s art represented the culmination of Russian
Landscape painting of the 19th century. His paintings
go beyond depicting objective representations of nature;
they are suffused with profound philosophical and social
significance.
Isaac Levitan was born in 1860 in Kybartai, Russia (now
Lithuania). His father moved the family to Moscow in the
early 1870’s to seek greater fame and fortune. Isaacs’s
mother and father died while he was attending the Moscow
College of Painting. Only seventeen, Levitan became homeless.
He stayed with friends and family and even slept in the
empty classrooms of the college. His tuition was waived
because of undue hardship.
Isaac’s
teachers, Vasily Polenov and Alexei Sarasov, stressed
the importance of working outdoors. Sarasov taught his
students to “seek out in the most ordinary and commonplace
phenomena the intimate, the infinitely touching and often
melancholy features which are strongly felt in our native
scenery and which evoke an overwhelming response in our
soul.” This was a philosophy that the young Levitan
would adopt in his own painting.
It was his ability to evoke the subtlest emotions in
his landscapes that helped Levitan to convey the Russian
landscape as no one else did. He is often associated with
Russian Impressionism. Although he painted in an Impressionist
manner, Levitan cannot be defined by this technique alone.
It is this aspect that elevates his art from French Impressionism.
The French school sought only to convey the fleeting effects
of light and contemporary life without any deeper meaning.
Isaac Levitan was a friend of the writer, Anton Chekhov.
Both men shared and nurtured a common view of nature and
mankind’s place in it. They both used nature as
a metaphor for human emotions in their art. It is an art
of the psychological landscape; the landscape of mood
and it has influenced generations of artists that have
followed him.
In 1897, Levitan was diagnosed with a heart condition.
Three years later, he died at the young age of forty.
Isaac
Levitan’s art represented the culmination of Russian
Landscape painting of the 19th century. His paintings
go beyond depicting objective representations of nature;
they are suffused with profound philosophical and social
significance.
Isaac’s
teachers, Vasily Polenov and Alexei Sarasov, stressed
the importance of working outdoors. Sarasov taught his
students to “seek out in the most ordinary and commonplace
phenomena the intimate, the infinitely touching and often
melancholy features which are strongly felt in our native
scenery and which evoke an overwhelming response in our
soul.” This was a philosophy that the young Levitan
would adopt in his own painting.
