The painter Mikhail Lebedev was a student of the landscape painter Maxim Vorobyov. Lebedev was called an innovator of the genre, since he was one of the first in Russia who began to paint landscapes mainly from nature, not from sketches in a workshop. Such work was an innovation for graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1830s.

At the end of the summer of 1834, Lebedev, as a pensioner of the Academy of Fine Arts, came to Italy to study art. He settled in Rome and, according to the memoirs of fine art expert Andrey Somov, Lebedev ‘began to work with ardor on the study of Italian nature.’

Lebedev wrote to his mentor Mikhail Vorobyov:

In April 1835, the painter went to Albano, the suburbs of Rome, and stayed there until late fall. He complained about ‘unbearable summer, incessant rains’ and painted five pictures.

Lebedev came to Albano for the second time in 1836 and began working on the painting ‘Italian Landscape’, displayed at the exhibition. This canvas is distinguished by the density and depth of colors. Despite depicting southern nature, the painter used a dark color. Trying to convey the density of the crowns and the interlacing of the branches, Lebedev painted the foliage in a continuous mass, without gaps of light and the play of sun glints.

To convey the abundance and lushness of vegetation, Lebedev applied paint to the canvas in thick, dense layers. The painter focused his attention on the foreground of the picture, painting it in more detail, in relief, in accordance with the academic painting tradition. The sunlight pouring from the depths of the picture enhances the contrast between the foreground and background. Behind the trees, Lebedev depicted the city in a light haze.

Such landscape is called romantic. The heyday of romanticism painting occurred at the beginning of the 19th century. Romantic paintings conveyed not so much a plot or a view, but rather the perception, feelings and emotions of the artist himself. At that time, the landscape genre acquired great importance, since the unity of a man with nature was one of the main themes of the philosophy of romanticism.

Mikhail Lebedev, 25, wrote ‘Italian Landscape’ a year before his death. He died in 1837 in Naples from cholera.