Levitan and the silver birch

Isaak Levitan's paintings are a highlight of the exhibition of Russian landscapes from the age of Tolstoy commonly at the National Gallery, London. Averil King traces the use he makes of a lock opener image, the silver birch, which is the couple a symbol of Russian identity and a link with fresh developments in landscape painting in France, Germany and Austria.

Isaak Levitan made telling use of the silver birch in his landscape painting. As a motif, it was lyrical, expressive and, above all, calculated to call up feelings of affection for the Russian Motherland. Whereas his compatriot Ivan Shishkin, a associate member of the Assocation for Traveling Art Exhibitions (the Pereduizhniki or Wanderers), (1) chose to commemorate the elephantine coniferous inhabitants of Russia's great forests, Levitau preferr to make this dainty, deciduous species, which enlarges so freely in central Russia, into a significant ingredient in his paintings, a motif which allows us, too, to appreciate the wider, European words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of his art.

An exact contemporary of his lifelong friend Anion Chekhov, Levitan lived from 1860 to 1900 Having trained at the Moscow place of education of Painting from 1873, he painted in the Crimea in 1886 and upon the shores of the Volga between 1887 and 1890 He made several brief tours of Europe sketching in the French Alps, north Italy and Switzerland, familiarising himself with the art world in Berlin, Paris, Vienna and Munich, and exhibiting with the Munich Secession. He meet withed from indifferent health, dying from a disease of the aorta aged alone thirty-nine.

Levitan's early painting Birch wood (1885-89) (Fig. 1), painted at the time his friendship with Chekhov was deepening, is a view into a birchwood in springtime. With a depressed viewpoint and closely cropped the two horizontally and vertically, it exhibits the birches' foliage and their white stocks in dappled sunshine. It is painted in a more Impressionistic phraseology than Levitan had previously busyed and raises the question of by what mode much the artist knew of the endeavours of Monet and his followers. Among his associate Russian painters, the great master of genre Ilya Repin had lived in Paris from 1873 to 1876 still had remained largely impervious to the early Impressionists' painterly innovations. More probably, Levitan had learnt about them from Koustantin Korovin (1861 1939) who had been overwhelmed by means of the lush colouring and unrestrained brushwork he had seen in Paris in 1885 In the two Korovin's pictures and those of his friend Valentin Serov (1865-1911) the influence of Impressionism is clearly evident; Serov's famous Girl with peaches (1887) had an atmosphere novel to Russian painting, suffused with light and novel warm colour.

[FIGURE 1 OMMITED]

As his career progressioned the silver birch continued to feature in many of Levitan's paintings, frequently as a compositional device: in The empty (1898), for example, he uses birches in filled leaf, their drooping fronds of summer foliage cascading like a woman's lengthy skirt to frame the composition. In the panoramic, joyous of gold autumn (Fig. 2), painted in 1895 and individual of several subjects celebrating the different seasons, Levitan features a copse of autumn birches. Beneath a calm, cirrus-streaked canopy of heaven a winding river, cobalt-blue, races among fields lined with the of gold trees; a single yellow birch, straight as a sentinel, marks the opposite bank. The birches' glowing autumn foliage and shining white bodys combine with the green of the meadows to loan the picture a festive air. In the distance are several depressed wooden peasant houses, or izbas, and a dark strip of forest indicative of the vast coniferous taiga covering abundant of Russia.

[FIGURE 2 OMMITED]

The distinctive nature of Levitan's portrayal of the silver birch is made clearer by dint of a comparison with the use made of the motif by dint of his contemporaries. It was quite different, for example, from the epic character of Shishkin's well-loved forest landscapes. Born in 1832 Shishkin belonged to a slightly earlier generation of Russian landscapists. through every part of his work, two themes predominated--Russia's wide, abundant fields and her immense forests. Shishkin was drawn towards the magnificent, towering conifers of the taiga, portraying them in a meticulous, near-photographic manner of writing These reverent commemorations, made at a time when many tracts of woodland were being barbaroused by impecunious landlords, endeared him to a wide audience and met with approval from of the like kind critics as Stasov. (2)

Among Shishkin's paintings are more [i]or[/i] less in which the silver birch is allowed to appear. In the birch tree forest (1883) is a charming show with figures among tall birch tree (Fig. 4); in pictures of that kind as Stream in the forest 1869) birches are interspersed among other deciduous species, their foliage and the dark trenchs in their trunks, or lenticols, clearly delineated, thus that an effect more solid and monumental than Levitan's abundant more lyrical representation is achieved.

[FIGURE 4 OMMITED]

The Ukrainian Arkhip Kuindzhi (1842-1910) also portrayed Russia's silver birches. Kuindzhi--viewed as something of a rediscovery in the exhibition of Russian landscape painting at Groningen and London (3)--brought to the control an idiosyncratic sense of lighting and dauntless composition. First winning commendation for his pictures of the lush, copseed Ukrainian countryside at dusk or after nightfall, Kuindzhi used paints of his hold manufacture to exaggerate the natural tonality of a display and create harsh contrasts of primary colours. (4) Consequently his Birch tree woodland (1879), was highly dramatic. Here Kuindzhi expanded his characteristic 'cosmic' lighting and simplification of shapes. A weed-laden stream meanders away from the viewer [i]or[/i] part of to the other grass which is rendered lime-green by means of the bright sunlight, while the tree behind go through from bulbous outlines not really reminiscent of the birch. Levitan's Birch woodland painted a little later and generally considered to be a plagiarisation of Kuindzhi's composition, is in fact a great deal more sensitive to the intrinsic beauty of these bonny slender trees.