The first paintings of the Astrakhan Collection came from Pavel Dogadin, the museum founder. He considered Levitan’s landscape painting In the Park to be one of his most successful and biggest acquisitions which was also the most expensive in his collection. In May 1917 Dogadin paid Pavel Saurov, the owner of the Permanent Art Exhibition in Moscow, as much as six thousand rubles for this artwork. In addition to Levitan’s paintings, the collection of the Astrakhan Art Gallery includes exhibition catalogs and newspaper articles devoted to Levitan’s creation collected by Pavel Dogadin.

Contemporaries of Isaak Levitan called him ‘master of the mood landscape’.

The artist’s painting In the Park depicts a peaceful abandoned corner of the park: a quiet backwater of the pond is overgrown with reeds and water lilies whose white cups seem to be glowing in the dark water. The landscape is filled with a hushed and melancholic reverie characteristic for Levitan of the 1880s.

At the time of the landscape creation, the artist was barely twenty but his skills and talent had already been highly appreciated by Pavel Tretyakov, a well-known philanthropist and the Tretyakov Gallery founder. At that time, Levitan lived in Ostankino, Moscow region. Painting exclusively from life, he created landscapes full of lyricism and filled with light sadness and love for Mother Nature. This is when In the Park was created.