Un paisible monastère

Levitan painted this in 1890, just after a long summer on the Upper Volga, and it pulls together several monasteries he had seen into one imagined place. A small monastery sits across the river in the last warm light of evening, and two plank footbridges reach out toward the viewer, the only link between that quiet far bank and the world we stand in. Russian critics loved it at once. It settled Levitan's reputation as the country's leading landscape painter, the man who could make a mood out of water and trees rather than a story. He was just 30 here, and would die of heart illness ten years later.