Landscape with Trees

Around 1909, when this landscape was painted, Matyushin was in his late forties and had recently gone back to art school. In 1906 he and his wife, the poet and painter Elena Guro, had enrolled at Elizaveta Zvantseva's private school in St Petersburg, where two artists of the World of Art circle, Léon Bakst and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, taught. They were remembered as teachers who largely left their students to find their own way. Landscape became the subject that husband and wife both kept returning to. The same collection holds a Landscape with Trees by Guro, which the museum dates to around 1910.