Becoming founder of  “mood landscape” genre.

Every travel tale has something special. Traveling the world allows you not only to see the most historical important sites or the worlds best food. Also visiting Kybartai, never forget, as he had say Gustav Flaubert, that travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. It began to grow rapidly in the middle of XIXth century when railway line to Koenigsberg was built and border station was established. Kybartai was founded under the reign of Sigismund I the Old, it’s a city in Marijampolė County (Lithuania), it’s located 20 km (12 mi), is on the border of Kaliningrad Oblast (Russia). The Russian landscape painter Isaac Ilyich Levitan was born here in 1860. If you are interested in history of Lithuania, you will have an opportunity not only take a look at Historical Old Town of Vilnius, but follow the tracks of Napoleon’s army, but also to participate at the pageant for of Anniversary Napoleon’s march through the Neman, near Kaunas.

A minor planet, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova in 1979, is named after him. Now ranked among the top modern artists within the landscape genre, he is considered to be one of the most influential figures in Russian Painting of the 19th-Century. He was able for portraying the seasons of the year, different times of the day and natural views. Although the depiction of light was crucial to his compositions, ISAAC LEVITAN was a realist rather than an Impressionist. His main contribution to Russian art was his development of the atmospheric landscape (mastery of colour, light and shade). He gave lessons at the Moscow School of Painting and exhibited regularly with such associations.

His hugely influential art heritage, consists of more than a thousand paintings among them watercolors, pastels, graphics, and illustrations. He was born into an August day in Kibartay (now in Lithuania), becoming one of Russia’s most influential landscape artists, and the founder of the “mood landscape.” The bleakness of his early life may well have inspired his subsequent artistic evolution, because his childhood and youth were marked by poverty. ISAAC LEVITAN was able to combine atmospheric dynamics with his capacity to reveal lives of humble peasants, uncovering the spiritualizing results of poverty.

At the end of the 1870s, his family moved to Moscow, where, his parents were loyal to their children’s passion to art. In 1875 ISAAC LEVITAN mother died, two years later, typhus took his father. A trip to the Crimea managed to improve his condition. Upon returning, he organized a personal exhibition of 60 landscape painting. Synthesizing the pursuits of his life in a single work, which was finally named “The Lake”, he shows a collective image of Russian nature, toghether his last thoughts. He spent the last year of his life in Crimea, where, in spite of the effects of a illness, his last works reflect tranquility and the eternal beauty of Russian nature. The White Dacha (now a museum), is the house that Anton Chekhov had built in Yalta, where he wrote some of his greatest work.  He, the author of over a thousand paintings, died in Moscow on a June day.

The intellectual property of the images that appear in this blog correspond to their authors. The sole purpose of this site, is to spread the knowledge of these artists and that other people enjoy their works.