Part III. The only Russian painter to compare with Shishkin in depicting the forest was a Jew from Lithuania, Isaak Levitan (1860-1900)

The only Russian painter to compare with Shishkin in depicting the forest was a Jew from Lithuania, Isaak Levitan (1860-1900), whom many, perhaps with justice, consider Russia's finest artist. He came from great poverty, was a lifelong depressive and suffered privation and internal exile during the worst pogroms of the 1880s and 1890s. In view of this, and his short working life, his record of achievement is noble. So is his versatility. Indeed, it is hard to think of any painter of nature, in any country or in any epoch, who grappled with such a wide range of subject matter, so confidently and well. In his forest scenes, Levitan moved in closer than Shishkin: his Footbridge, Savvino Village (1884) is almost a miniature of a village on the forest edge, and his Birch Grove (1885; both Tretyakov) is almost an orchard. He loved the autumn specially—it suited his sombre mood—and his September scenes, such as Golden Autumn (1895, Russian Museum), the Vladimirka Road (1892) and Autumn (1896; both Tretyakov), take us closer to the actual feel of a Russian village landscape near the end of the century than all the rest of the Russian school put together. He did some superb watercolours too, of which Autumn Mist (1899) and Storks in Sky, Spring (1884), are outstanding examples. Indeed the more one examines his work, the more one wonders at it, combining as it does all kinds of subject matter, all districts, all seasons, with impeccable virtuosity and genuine emotion—indeed love.

Levitan had no reason to love Russia or the Russians, but he did. And he celebrated his love in some magnificent canvases which used the beauty and grandeur of the Russian scene to express spiritual values hovering just beneath its surface. In the Russian Museum, St Petersburg, there is a superb, smallish canvas, Golden Autumn in the Village, showing a garden, manor house and farm

37 Golden Autumn, 1895