Description of the picture:
Dusk. Ricks – Isaac Ilyich Levitan. 1899. Oil on cardboard. 59.8X74.6
The motive of this painting by Isaac Ilyich Levitan is extremely simple – a mown field, sky with a dim moon and haystacks… But what a penetration, what a high poetry! “To such amazing simplicity and clarity of motive that Levitan has recently reached,” said A.P. Chekhov, “no one has reached him, but I don’t know if anyone will come after.
In the late period, the artist’s work is characterized by generalization and laconicism, combined with a great content of the image of nature. Levitan now loves to write evening and night nature – a time when some kind of special, invisible life awakens in her. At this twilight hour, nature subsides, as if listening to itself. In the air thickening from the dark, the forms lose their bulk and mass, seem ghostly. Stacks look like silhouettes. Their repeating measured, unhurried rhythm informs the landscape of the mood of a quiet nap. Unmoving in the dim light of a dim moon, nature seems mysterious, mysterious, wary. With amazing penetration, sensitivity and vigilance, Levitan captures the subtlest manifestations of nature’s life, its internal beating and rhythm, hidden before him from the eyes of artists. The artist reveals this in an equally imperceptible, subtle movement of color. The finest shades of green, purple, blue create the harmony of the night landscape."