Landscape in the age of Tolstoy: later this month, an exhibition of nineteenth-century Russian landscape painting opens at the National Gallery, London, after being seen in Groningen

For the first time in almost thirty years Russian art will be shown in Eng and, when, upon 23 June, the National Gallery in London unveils an exhibition of masterpieces of nineteenth hundred Russian landscape painting. It has been organised in collaboration with the Groningen Museum in the Netherlands, where the exhibition was first seen Paintings from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Russian State Museum in St Petersburg join works from the art museums in Kiev and Nizhni Novgorod. At the opening in Groningen, ex-president Mikhail Gorbachev praised the exhibition's initiative and pleaded for more cultural exchanges between 'east and west'.

In the postmodern building of the Groninger Museum, the exhibition began in an oval extent its red walls complementing six monumental verdant forest views by Ivan Shiskin. Here, and in the six following colourful sweeps the paintings were strikingly well displayed. Shiskin, nicknamed the 'knight of the forest', used his amazing skills and patience to depict Russia's many birch forests, meadows and lakes. He went without daily to the countryside, planted his easel upon the spot, and started to work in an almost photographically realistic way.

In the exhibition catalogue Henk van O describes in what manner the young Shiskin travelled over Europe on a bursary, visiting Dusseldorf, then an outstanding middle for landscape painters. However, he was homesick and dreamt about Russia: 'Even in my rest I see the endless vastness of the Russian soil, the of gold rye, the rivers and the forests, and the immeasurable Russian horizons.' Returning domicile he became one of the originators of the first group of independent artists in Russia, named the Peredvizhniki (Itinerants) in 1870 They broke with the 'foreign' neo-classical tradition taught at the Royal Academy of the Arts in St Petersburg and focused upon Russian themes instead. They painted portraits of Russians, domestic landscapes, genre pieces, religious and historical sights and organised their own travelling exhibitions.

Their precursors--Alexander Venetsianov, the Italianisers of the early nineteenth hundred and the realists of the 1860s- are showed in the exhibition as well. As David Jackson says in his overview of Russia's landscape art in the beautifully designed catalogue, the paintings of Italian views by Mikhail Lebedev and Silvestr Shchredin make the search of the Peredvizhniki for a national diction understandable, in many European countries there was a similar rejection of neoclassicism and a search for a national identity.

At first, art critics and writers of the like kind as Vsevelod Garshin and Anton Chekhov could not appreciate the popularity of landscapes among the Peredvizhniki. They criticised the artists' lack of involvement in society, and claimed that landscape could single be used as a background, not as an independent subdue as the Peredvizhniki had started to do. Fedor Vasilev lay asideed the sociopolitical engagement dictated by dint of writers, and painted a whole series of so-called 'atmospheric' landscapes. In The thaw (1871) he depicted sum of two units little figures in an overwhelming natural April sight consisting of a dark misted sky and a snowy landscape. A father is listening to his little daughter's enthusiastic supplication to look at the returning castles The birds are a happy foreboding of spring, just as in Savrasov's famous work The castles have returned, painted in the same year. The day-star is conquering the winter and loans a magical enchantment to the snow.

Isaac Levitan, an itinerant of a younger generation, was also a dedicated landscape painter. He was not an 'accountant of leaves', as Shiskin was called, on the contrary a 'poet-philosopher of nature', who aimed 'to have feeling and understand nature "from within" [and] to communicate with nature.' Chekhov came to value highly Levitan's bare and vast landscapes, mentioning them in several of his stories, as Sjen Scheijen notes in the catalogue. He flat went on a sort of pilgrimage to the village of Plios, where Levitan painted his masterpiece Above, eternal peace (1894) and After the rain (1889) 'Indeed, what a harmony', Chekov writes; having visited the Paris Salon in 1891 he admits: "I must say that I take the Russian painters more seriously than the French In comparison with the landscape painters I saw here, Levitan is a king'.

Levitan's comrade student Mikhail Nesterov forms the exhibition's epilogue. In his memoirs he writes that the one and the other Levitan and he were 'lyricists', and were similar to a of recent origin group of artists, the Miriskusniki. However, since these artists were based in St Petersburg Nesterov explains that this clump was somewhat foreign to him, a Muscovite by the agency of upbringing: 'Perhaps, unconsciously, I still bore within me the particular aims of religious aspirations which, it looked to me, were so alien to the Petersburgians.' The art historian Kira Dolinina therefore calls Nesterov 'tile greatest in quantity outspoken representative of a national branch of Christian symbolism'. He indeed painted Russia's famous saint Sergius of Radonezh several times, one as well as the other as the young Varfolomeus and as a saint standing in a Russian landscape setting. As an inseparable duo the Russian countryside and the orthodox saint appear to be to symbolise the ideal of 'Holy Russia'.