Sokolniki. Herbst

In 1879 the police ordered Jews out of Moscow after a young radical shot at the tsar, and the 18-year-old Isaac Levitan, still an art student, had to leave the city and take rooms in a village beyond it. That autumn he painted this path through the Sokolniki park, wet leaves darkening underfoot, the young pines closing in on either side. The lone woman in black walking toward us is the one human figure in Levitan's whole body of landscape work, and he did not paint her himself. His friend Nikolai Chekhov, brother of the writer Anton, added her. Pavel Tretyakov bought the canvas for his Moscow gallery, the first Levitan he acquired, so the picture stayed in the city its maker had just been told to leave.