Au bord du gouffre d'eau

Levitan finished this dark, still stretch of water early in 1892, and Pavel Tretyakov bought it for his gallery almost at once. Later that year the painter's own life turned. In the autumn of 1892 the authorities expelled Jews from Moscow, and Levitan, born to a poor Jewish family, had to leave the city and wait months before influential friends could get him back. The place itself already carried unease. Locals tied the spot to an old story of a drowning, the kind of folk tale that had fed the poet Pushkin, and Levitan let the low light and the plank footbridge lead the eye toward the deeper, blacker water beyond. He grouped it with two other large, brooding canvases, the works his friends came to call his gloomy trilogy.