Otoño dorado

Levitan painted this in the autumn of 1895 while staying at a country estate in the Tver region, north of Moscow, sketching the little Syezha river as its banks turned. It is one of his sunniest pictures, which is worth noting, because the painter was often ill and prone to deep depression, and would be dead within five years, not yet 40. Here none of that shows. A grove of white birches burns yellow along the water, the river bends away cool and blue toward a distant village, and the whole field is warm. Pavel Tretyakov, the Moscow merchant building Russia's national collection, bought it the next year, and it hangs in his gallery still.