Isaac Ilich Levitan, 1861-1900

The Collection of Leo Makovsky

Christie’s, Geneva, 17 May 1994, Lot 189

Christie’s, New York, 24 October 2002, Lot 15

Moscow, Posthumous Exhibition of Works by the Academician I.I.Levitan, 1901, No.83

St. Petersburg, Posthumous Exhibition of Works by the Academician I.I.Levitan, 1901, No.93

S.Glagol and I.Grabar, Isaak Il’ich Levitan, Moscow, 1913, p.102, illustrated opp. P.16

A.Fedorov-Davidov, Isaak Il’ich Levitan, vol I, Moscow, 1966, vol.I illustrated p.93, vol.II listed No.223

Valentin Serov's famous portrait of Levitan painted in 1893 shows a handsome man with a penetrating gaze, but his facial expression and body language speak of melancholy and introspection.  His formative years were beset by tragedy: his mother and father died within two years of each other.  Orphaned and penniless, it is a testament to his natural talent that he managed to enter the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1873.  Poverty followed him throughout life as, by all contemporary accounts, did his propensity to melancholy.

The Watermill, Sunset of 1880, was painted during one of the artist's most joyous periods, the summers he spent in the small town of Plyos on the banks of the river Volga.  Anton Chekhov commented that in the works Levitan produced in Plyos he could even detect a smile.  Alexander Benois observed that Tranquil Abode, painted there in 1890, was one of his most significant works to date.

It is true that the Plyos works differ from his landscapes of the 70s and early 80s which were painted under the influence of his teacher Alexei Savrasov, who had inspired in his pupil a deep appreciation, perhaps even love, of nature.  And they do not reach for the sublime in the way that some of his later masterpieces do.  However, they comprise some of the most accessible and pleasurable paintings of his entire oeuvre.

Levitan painted this same view at least three times.  The first work The Watermill, Autumn, (State Tretyakov Gallery) was exhibited at the Moscow Society of Art Lovers in 1889.  Two others are recorded in Glagol and Grabar as being in private Moscow collections in 1903 (one in the collection of D.A. Shcherbinovsky; the other, the offered lot, in the collection of E.A.Teleshovaya).

The Watermill, Sunset depicts a shifting time of day.  Although both it and the Tretyakov version encapsulate a mood of "ending", the offered lot is perhaps the more immediate and expressive.  We can see the watermill cast into shadow, the sun is setting at the other side of the river.  The day is closing and there remain only a few minutes more of sunlight, although the sky still seems to radiate with light.  A moment of nature’s omniscience, yet so elusive and brief.  It is this heroic search to capture the intangible that marks Levitan apart from his contemporary Ivan Shishkin, and lends his paintings of Russian landscapes universal appeal.

He brought to a summation that which Vasiliev, Savrasov and Polenov had foretold.  Levitan discovered the peculiar charm of Russian landscape "moods"; he found a distinctive style to Russian landscape art which would have been distinguished illustrations to the poetry of Pushkin, Koltzov, Gogol, Turgenyev and Tyutchev.  He rendered the inexplicable charm of our humble poverty, the shoreless breadth of our virginal expanses, the festal sadness of the Russian autumn, and the enigmatic call of the Russian spring.  There are no human beings in his paintings, but they are permeated with a deep emotion which floods the human heart,  Alexander Benois, The Russian School of Painting, 162-163.