Frühling. Hochwasser

Levitan painted this in 1897, and by then his heart was failing. He would be dead three years later, at 39. The subject is the Russian spring flood, when the rivers rise and stand among the trees before draining away. Slender birches and young aspens grow straight up out of the still water, doubled in their own reflection, and a plain wooden boat waits in the foreground where someone has pulled it ashore. There are no figures and no drama, only the pale light of early spring and water lying where there is usually solid ground. He returned to these flooded spring woods again and again in his last years.