Über der ewigen Ruhe

Levitan made this by Lake Udomlya in the Tver region over the summer of 1893 and into 1894. He was in his early thirties and already seriously ill with the heart disease that would kill him at 39. He took a small wooden church he had drawn years earlier at Plyos on the Volga and set it, with its little graveyard, on a spit of land beneath an enormous grey sky and a lake that seems to have no far shore. He wrote to a friend that the whole of himself was in this picture. Tolstoy called it a prayer of the mute soul. The wooden church that had given him the motif burned down in 1903, three years after the painter's own death.