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The Watermill, Sunset, 1880 (Click the pic)

This beautiful painting by Isaac Levitan broke surface at Sotheby’s recently and accrued a bit more value. Over half a million quid, actually.

The illumination by slanting afternoon or early evening light is a motif that Levitan often employs for its wistful, melancholic qualities.

At this time in his short life he was feeling almost happy for once, so I suppose that the light in this canvas is more significant than the dark. (Read the notes after the fold.)

The more I look at Levitan’s work, the more it strikes me that although he is rightly celebrated as one of the greatest Russian landscape painters (if not THE greatest), he also shows some very strong symbolist tendencies.

Over and over again Levitan incorporates the signs of transition and progression into his pictures. Have a look at how often he includes a body of water that is equipped with a shaky or unreliable means of crossing it. There are bridges, jetties, boats and walkways that lead the viewer onto a distant and frequently golden farther shore.

To my mind ( and I might just be projecting here, so don’t take this conjecture too seriously) Levitan seems to be reaching for some sort of salvation or validation that always seems just out of his reach.

Take notice of the evening sunlight and the risky looking causeways that lead towards it in the following series of pictures.

By The Deep Waters

The Quiet Abode

Evening Bells

Over Eternal Rest

Study for “The Lake”

The above picture was a study for the one, below, which was unfortunately left unfinished at the time of his premature death.

The Lake.

UPDATE Andrei Riabovitchev has posted a couple of portfolios of Levitan’s work on his blog, RusArt here and here.

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.

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