ISAAC LEVITAN (1860-1900)
The Roman-Koch (1,545 m - 5, 069 ft)
Ukraine (de jure) / Russia (de facto)
From In the Crimean Mountains, oil on canvas, 1886, Tretyakov Gallery Moscow
The mountain
The Roman-Koch (1545m- ) or Mountain of the Romans is the highest peak of the Crimean mountain. Its name recalls the ancient Roman prefecture of the East of Cherson. This natural space is protected by the Crimean Nature Reserve. The Crimean Mountains form the Crimean extension of the Greater Caucasus. At its feet, along the Black Sea, lie the towns of Sevastopol, the largest port in Crimea, and Yalta, a seaside resort famous for agreements signed in 1945. Archaeologists have found the oldest anatomically modern human in Europe at the Buran-Kaya site in the Crimean Mountains. The fossils are 32,000 years old with artefacts related to Gravettian culture.
The painter
Isaac Ilyich Levitan (Исаа́к Ильи́ч Левита́н) was a classical Russian landscape painter who advanced the genre of the "mood landscape". Levitan's work was a profound response to the lyrical charm of the Russian landscape. Levitan did not paint urban landscapes; with the exception of the View of Simonov Monastery (whereabouts unknown), mentioned by Nesterov, the city of Moscow appears only in the painting Illumination of the Kremlin. During the late 1870s he often worked in the vicinity of Moscow, and created the special variant of the "landscape of mood"(see above), in which the shape and condition of nature are spiritualized, and become carriers of conditions of the human soul. During work in Ostankino, he painted fragments of the mansion’s house and park, but he was most fond of poetic places in the forest or modest countryside. Characteristic of his work is a hushed and nearly melancholic reverie amidst pastoral landscapes largely devoid of human presence. Fine examples of these qualities include The Vladimirka Road, 1892, Evening Bells, 1892, and Eternal Rest, 1894, all in the Tretyakov Gallery. Though his late work displayed familiarity with Impressionism, his palette was generally muted, and his tendencies were more naturalistic and poetic than optical or scientific.
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2021 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
