Isaac Levitan

Isaac Levitan was a Russian painter who advanced the genre of the "mood landscape". He was born in a poor but educated Jewish family in Kibarty, a small town in the Russian Empire (present-day Lithuania). He moved to Moscow with his family in 1870 and entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1873. He studied under Alexei Savrasov, Vasily Perov and Vasily Polenov, and became friends with Nikolai Chekhov, the brother of Anton Chekhov. He suffered from poverty and ill health throughout his life, and lost both of his parents by 1877. He was also persecuted for his Jewish origins and had to leave Moscow several times due to anti-Semitic policies. He received a scholarship from the school and patronage from Pavel Tretyakov, the founder of the Tretyakov Gallery, who bought his first painting in 1880. Levitan participated in the mobile art exhibitions of the Peredvizhniki group and became a member of the partnership in 1891. He traveled extensively in Russia and abroad, painting various landscapes and scenes of nature. He was influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as well as by the Russian sign painting and the Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani. He developed his own style of lyrical realism, expressing the mood and emotions of the places he depicted. He also experimented with near-abstract art and created the Rayonist movement with Natalia Goncharova, whom he later married. He was recognized as one of the most original and popular Russian landscape painters of his time, and received several awards and honors, including the Order of Saint Stanislaus from Tsar Alexander III and the membership of the Academy of Arts. He died of heart failure in 1900 at the age of 39 and was buried in the Dorogomilovo Cemetery in Moscow. He left behind a large body of work, mostly oil paintings, but also watercolors, sketches and etchings. His paintings are widely admired for their beauty, harmony and poetic atmosphere. He is regarded as a master of the "mood landscape" and a precursor of modernism in Russian art.