Levitan

A landmark event happened on August 23 2008 in the village of Eliseikovo, in the Petushinsky District near Vladimir - the Levitan House of Landscape opened.

August 18 (by the Old Style, 30): Born into the family of a railroad employee Ilya Abramovich Levitan in Kibarty (today Kibartai village in Lithuania).

"The import and significance of every true, great artist consists in the irresistible appeal of his personality and in how it reflects in his artwork", wrote Leonid Pasternak in a memoir about Isaac Levitan. The originality of Levitan as an artist lies in his being a natural, entirely self-sufficient landscape artist who fully realized his talent in landscape art. His landscapes eclipsed all his forays into different genres and creative activities. Who remembers now that Levitan illustrated magazines and books, designed stage sets, created portraits and still-lifes?

When Yulia Sergeievna, the heroine of Anton Chekhov's 1895 story "Three Years", and her husband visited an art show in Easter week, making a tour of the rooms, she "stopped before a small landscape... In the foreground was a stream, over it a little wooden bridge; on the further side a path that disappeared in the dark grass; a copse on the right; near it a camp fire - no doubt of watchers by night; and in the distance there was a glow of the evening sunset. Yulia imagined walking herself along the little bridge, and then along the little path further and further, while all round was stillness, the drowsy landrails calling and the fire flickering in the distance. And for some reason she suddenly began to feel that she had seen those very clouds that stretched across the red part of the sky, and that copse, and that field before, many times before. She felt lonely, and longed to walk on and on along the path; and there, in the glow of sunset was the calm reflection of something unearthly, eternal."

"Levitan's landscape" is a term firmly ingrained both in art scholarship and in the minds of many art lovers. A "Levitan landscape" is different from an "Ivan Shishkin landscape" or even landscapes by Alexei Savrasov or Vasily Polenov, although it is very close to the last ones. Usually, a "Levitan landscape" is a simple image of an almost always deserted natural environment - a creek, a narrow pathway, groves rolling on into the depth of the picture in a somewhat diagonal direction, or copses. It is set in different seasons, except (largely) winter -Levitan's pieces almost never feature images of snowy winter -and usually depicts a transitional season or summer; there are blue horizons and a high limitless sky with a distinct life of its own, beyond the mental grasp of human beings.