Golden Autumn

Isaac Levitan began this painting in the autumn of 1895 while staying at the Gorka estate in Tver province, northwest of Moscow. The river is thought to be the Syezha, about half a kilometre from the house, and he finished the canvas in Moscow. The collector Pavel Tretyakov bought it in 1896 for 700 rubles and gave it to his gallery, where it still hangs. Levitan was best known for quiet, melancholy landscapes, and this bright, joyful picture was unusual for him. It belongs to a short run of sunny works from 1895 to 1897 that show the influence of French Impressionism, the style of painting outdoors to catch changing light and color. Levitan was born in 1860 into a poor Jewish family in what is now Lithuania and studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under the landscape painter Alexei Savrasov. He was a close friend of the writer Anton Chekhov, joined the Wanderers, a society of Russian realist painters, and died in 1900 aged only thirty-nine.