Picture “Vladimirka”, Levitan – description and video

Description of the picture:

Vladimirka – Levitan. 1892. Oil on canvas. 79×123

Historical landscape is a rare genre. The painting was painted during that difficult period of the artist’s life, when he himself was sent outside of Moscow, in connection with his "foreign" origin.

The path of any Russian convict in the 18th and 19th centuries began with the Vladimirsky tract. It is very symbolic that the work was created several years after those sentenced to correction by Siberia began to be taken out by train. The tract is resting. He is deserted. A lonely wandering traveler makes the landscape even more deserted and lifeless. Unaccustomed emptiness and silence fills the work with a disturbing atmosphere, special energy. In this intense silence, the ringing of shackles, the woeful moans of the convicts, and the menacing cries of the overseers are barely audible.

For the artist, the very appearance of this road is in tune with his own condition: an exile in his beloved country.

A huge and cloudy sky covers Vladimirka, which goes into the distance. There is no end to this path of suffering and grief. But in the distance, the white church is barely visible. This symbol of timid hope for the best, bright, good, could not help but appear in the picture. Without this, by the way, the detail invented by the author, the mood of the work would be even more painful and sad.

A milestone is also an important detail. He, like a metronome, measured recently the time of hard labor and the suffering of the unfortunate.

The artist avoids bright colors, the whole landscape is consonantly painted in dull colors. Left without "work" the path gradually overgrows, like the human memory itself of past sorrows and troubles. But the anxiety and tension of the atmosphere does not give the viewer a single opportunity to relax and brush aside the problem in the work. By exclusively artistic methods, the author manages to draw attention to an acute social problem. Moreover, his methods did not allow censorship to limit the availability of work to the mass audience."

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