Dusk. Haystacks

Levitan painted this in 1899, and he did not have long left. His heart was failing, and he was 39, with barely a year to live. In these last months his work grew quieter. He set aside the bright, sunlit fields he was known for and went after something harder to hold, the few minutes when the light goes out of a summer evening and the haystacks turn to dark shapes against the sky. He made a whole group of these twilight studies that year in a village in Novgorod province. He spent that New Year with his friend Anton Chekhov down in Yalta, still sketching stacks of hay at dusk.