Contemporaries of Isaac Levitan descried the fin-de-siècle emotions of a lonely and suffering soul in the artist’s melancholic images.
Permeated with subtle music, this particular work is a classic example of the mature oeuvre of this leading master of Russian “mood landscape” painting. The ghostly moonlight and the mirror-like surface of the lake duplicate reality, transforming the landscape. Frozen in its nightly ritual of standing before its sorrowful luminary, the landscape seems immersed in its own secrets, estranged and cold to man.

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).