Winter landscape with mill. 1884 Isaac Ilyich Levitan (1860-1900)

Description of Isaac Levitan’s painting "Winter Landscape with Mill".

Isaac Ilyich Levitan was born into a Jewish family in the Lithuanian town of Kibarta, on the border with Poland. From his early years until his death, his origins were the cause of constant humiliation of the artist and disrespect for his talent. Already during his studies at the Art School in Moscow, the young Isaac began to create the most talented landscape works. However, most of the teachers considered the boy’s enthusiasm for the Russian landscape insincere and far-fetched.

Upon graduation Levitan was awarded a diploma of teacher of cursive and not a painter - although while still a student one of his works were bought for a lot of money Tretyakov for his gallery. The humiliation continued later on - the artist was twice deported from Moscow "for his origins. Only at the age of thirty-eight, two years before his death, he finally received the title of Academician of painting. All these peripetias had a bad effect on his health - he suffered from a heart aneurysm and died in the prime of life, leaving a large number of magnificent landscapes. Despite his origins, today Levitan is considered the "most Russian" landscape painter. In his paintings he was able to capture the essence of the soul of Russian nature, show the variability of its moods, the subtle changes of the weather and the seasons.

Painting "Winter Landscape with a Mill" - one of the most poetic "winter" works of Levitan. Despite the stinginess of colors and almost entirely black and white coloring, the painting conveys the cheerfulness of Russian winter. The thaw portrayed by the artist allowed a small river to throw off the shackles of ice. The dark blue water reflects the winter sky, the bare branches of trees and bushes. The river banks are hidden by slightly thawed, moisture-soaked drifts. In the center of the picture is a small old mill, built of mossy black logs.

The thatched roof is almost entirely covered with snow, but in some places the white cover has crumbled, revealing tattered, rotten sheaves of straw. A little farther away, flimsy bridges over the river disappeared into the coastal bushes. The dark, watery thaw near the mill house is bristling with wilted brown grass, and the slippery black earth is showing beneath it.

In the background is a dark ridge of forest, lightly powdered with snow. The low, bright, monochrome sky takes up more than a third of the painting’s space. Levitan believed that the true artist must paint "not individual items, but to try to capture the overall, the effect of life. In the painting "Winter Landscape with a mill," he succeeded in full measure, for the rhythm of light and dark colors, the subtleties of black and white details evolves into a coherent picture.

Looking at the canvas you can literally feel the wet snow under your feet crunching and shrinking, and the icy meltwater gurgling happily, making its way to the light. Looking at the white powder covered low shrub trunks near the mill building, one can imagine the dry black branches crunching in one’s hands as they shed their snowy clothes on the ground. The painting reeks of a foreboding spring, of a quick thaw. Nature, depicted by the talented hand of the artist, is ready to free itself from its shackles and revive - but it’s still dormant under the cold northern sky.