Isaac Levitan was born in 1860 into a well-educated but poor Jewish family. His grandfather was a rabbi. Isaac’s father also studied at the rabbinical school, but did not follow the path of religious asceticism becoming a teacher of foreign languages.

Despite the challenging financial situation, the family did not object when Isaac decided to study painting. At that time, becoming a wealthy artist was not easy, and middle-class painters did not earn much.

In 1873, Levitan entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. The years of study was a challenging time for him. Later, the artist wrote:

In 1879, Levitan’s situation worsened: after the assassination attempt on Emperor Alexander II, which was committed by the member of ‘Narodnaya Volya’ [‘People”s Will’], Alexander Soloviev, the tsarist administration began to evict Jews from Moscow. For some time, Isaac lived with his sister’s family in Saltykovskaya near Moscow, from where he had to walk to school because of his bad financial situation, and then moved to Ostankino, which was also outside the city. But despite the circumstances, Levitan worked and managed to show the painting “Autumn Day. Sokolniki”. This painting was bought by the collector Pavel Tretyakov, which at that time was considered the highest of possible marks.

However, Levitan left the school without the title of artist: he was given a diploma of a calligraphy teacher. “A talented Jewish boy irritated other teachers, ” wrote Konstantin Paustovsky. “A Jew, in their opinion, should not have touched the Russian landscapes. It was the work of Russian artists only.”

Despite having difficulties with his diploma, Levitan headed a landscape class at the Moscow School of Fine Arts, and in 1898, he was awarded the title of academician of landscape painting.

In Levitan’s landscapes, there was always a hidden psychological subtext: he was called the master of the ‘mood landscape’. A small landscape study, which is displayed at the exhibition of the Chelyabinsk State Museum of Fine Arts, was painted by the artist in a restrained color palette, with wide strokes that resembled the painting manner of the Impressionists. ‘Levitan’s landscape’ is a simple landscape motif, almost always deserted: a river, a path going diagonally into the depths of the picture, groves, coppices at different times of the year, blue horizons and a high endless sky.