The master of the ‘everyday motive’, Isaac Levitan continued the lyrical landscape tradition, started by his teacher painter Alexey Savrasov. He enriched Russian landscape painting with his picturesque-plastic quests, opening a new page in art history of the end of the 19th century. Levitan’s canvases reflect his ability to endow the landscape with human emotions. A favorite painter of Levitan was Camille Corot, who believed that the landscape reflects the “soul” of the artist. Feodor Chaliapin, Levitan’s friend wrote: ‘The more I looked at his deeply poetic landscapes, the more I began to understand and appreciate the great feeling and poetry in art.’
Levitan advanced the lyrical ‘mood landscape’, where the author’s emotional experience is expressed with delicate psychological analysis. The artist was able to add a particular mood or feeling even to the simplest landscape. One such work is the landscape from the Omsk Museum collection “Autumn. The Manor “. In the summer of 1894, Levitan met Anna Turchaninova, who was staying at her estate Gorka next to Lake Ostrovensky. In 1894-1895, the artist spent a lot of time at her estate. He painted the surrounding landscapes, worked a lot with pastels, appreciating their restrained color qualities and velvety surface.
Created in 1894, the landscape “Autumn. The Manor” depicts an old two-floor wooden house in the middle of a deforested park. The faded color and the monotonous rhythm of the vertical trunks relay the mood of nature, sad of dying away. The feeling of sadness melts in the autumn air along with the smell of fallen leaves, which cause an almost physical sensation of dry rustling under one’s foot. The sad composition and light melody of the landscape brings to mind Chekhov’s short story “A House with a Mezzanine”, which was also inspired by the author’s stay at the Gorka estate. In the spring of 1895 in Gorka, Levitan created a still-life ‘White Lilac’.
