This canvas, with its slow rhythm of life, full of implicit melancholy and a feeling of lacking a home, is a concrete landscape, but also a "portrait" of the artist’s soul. The artist painted a view of the countryside surrounding Moscow — a slowly flowing deep river with reddish-brown groves on its banks still covered with snow under a grey, cloudy sky. The painter found in nature the conditions that corresponded with his own internal mood and the problems of people of the turn of the century. In large part, this is achieved by the musical subtlety of his colour choices — elegantly harmonious grey, reddish-brown and white tones.

Levitan Isaac

Levitan, Isaac Ilich (1860, Kibarty (Lithuania) - 1900, Moscow)
Painter, graphic artist, teacher. Studied under Alexei Savrasov and Vasily Polenov at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1873-1885). Academician of painting (1898). Member of the Society of Travelling Art Exhibitions (1891) and the Munich Sezession (1897), Contributed to exhibitions (from 1880). Contributed to the exhibitions of the Society of Travelling Art Exhibitions (1884-1900), periodical exhibitions of the Moscow Society of Lovers of the Arts (1887-1900), Fellowship of South Russian Artists (1892), Moscow Fellowship of Artists (1893), Munich Sezession (1896, 1898, 1899), Exhibition of Russian and Finnish Artists (1898), World of Art (1899, 1900), Pan-Russian Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod (1896), International Exhibition in Munich (1898) and the World Exhibitions in Chicago (1893) and Paris (1900). Taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1898-1900).