Isaac Levitan

Isaac Levitan (1860–1900) was a Russian landscape painter, born in Kibarty in what is now Lithuania. From 1873 he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under Alexei Savrasov, Vasily Perov and Vasily Polenov. He belonged to the Peredvizhniki, exhibiting with them from 1884 and becoming a member in 1891. Levitan is remembered for the mood landscape, in which nature seems to carry the feelings of the person looking at it. The collector Pavel Tretyakov bought his Autumn Day. Sokolniki in 1880 and later acquired some twenty more of his works. Among his best-known pictures are A Quiet Monastery (1890), Vladimirka (1892), Evening Bells (1892), Over Eternal Peace (1894) and Golden Autumn (1895). In 1897 he was elected to the Imperial Academy of Arts, and in 1898 he took charge of the landscape studio at the Moscow school. He spent his last year at Anton Chekhov's house in Crimea and died in Moscow in August 1900, aged 39.