Sunrise

 

Soloppgang I Åsgårdstrand (Sunrise in Åsgårdstrand), by Edvard Munch, 1893-94.

Matin sur la Seine, le beau temps, by Claude Monet, 1897.

Beach Scene - Sunrise, by David Cox, circa 1820.

 Daybreak, by Isaac Levitan, 1890.

Above the Clouds at Sunrise, by Frederic Edwin Church, 1849.

Wheatfield at Sunrise, by Vincent van Gogh, 1889.

 Sunrise, by Edward Mitchell Bannister, circa second half of the nineteenth century.

Sunrise in Feodosia, by Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, 1852.

Sunrise, Eastern Arms of Shoreham Harbour, West Sussex, by Isaac Walter Jenner, circa 1870s.

Haystacks at Chailly, by Claude Monet, 1865.

The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1842.

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And with these, hope for the coming year.

Snow in Russia - paintings by Isaac Levitan

Forest in the winter, 1885.

I've posted about Levitan before; he was certainly one of the very greatest landscape artists of all time. This is just a small selection of his paintings of... snow!

Early Spring, 1898.

The Last Snow; Village of Savvinskaya., 1884.

Garden in the Snow, circa 1880s.

Countryside; Winter, 1877-1878.

The Tomb of Nadia Yakovleva, 1882.

Springtime; The Last Snow, 1895.

Gray Day, 1895.

Early March, 1900.

Horse-Drawn Sled in the Winter.

Winter, 1895.

Winter Landscape with Mill, 1884.

Boulevard in the Evening, 1883.

March, 1895.

Winter Landscape; Hunters in the Snow, 1876.

Dark landscapes, paintings by Stanislav Zhukovsky

Another Russian artist, a painter of wonderfully atmospheric work, of whom I knew nothing. I first became aware of his beautifully lit and brightly colored interiors - which I will post about soon enough - but I was thrilled to come across these moody and poetic landscapes. Work that shows the deep influence of his teacher, the great Isaac Levitan, but made remarkable and unique by his own vigorous brushwork and particular feeling for color.

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Zhukovsky, 1921.

Stanislav Yulianovich Zhukovsky (13 May 1873, Yendrikhovtsy, Grodno Province, now Belarus -  1944, Pruszków concentration camp near Warsaw), Polish-Russian Impressionist painter.

Born into an aristocratic Polish family - who had been deprived of their noble status and privileges on account of their participation in the anti-Russian uprising of 1863 - he spent his childhood at his father’s family estate. He studied at Warsaw's classical gymnasium, then the college in Bialystok, where his study of art began. At the age of nineteen he moved to Moscow, where he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. He studied under several celebrated teachers, but Isaac Levitan certainly had the most influence on his early work. He would win several awards during his time there.

Zhukovsky became a celebrated landscape artist associated with the Impressionist movement. He regularly participated in exhibitions of the Moscow Society of Art Lovers, those of the Society of Travelling Art Exhibitions, and his work was shown with the Mir Iskusstva (“World of Art”) group. In 1903 he joined the Union of Russian Artists, and participated in their exhibitions until 1923.

He spent much of his career traveling, but in 1907 he established his own art studio/school in Moscow, where he taught until the October Revolution of 1917. His aristocratic origins and previous associations - one of his specialties was painting grand manor house interiors - made him suspect with the new régime, and in 1923 Zhukovsky immigrated to Poland, living in Warsaw and Cracow and exhibiting internationally. His career continued successfully until the beginning of World War II. During the German occupation of Poland, at the time of the Warsaw Uprising, he was arrested and held at the concentration camp at Pruszków where he died in his seventy-first year.

Isaac Levitan

Evening Bells, 1892.

Isaac Ilyich Levitan (30 August 1860, Wirballen – 22 July 1900, Moscow), considered by many the greatest Russian landscape painter.  He was born in a shtetl in Lithuania to a poor but educated family.  When he was ten, his family moved to Moscow where, in 1873, he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.  His mother died two years later, and his father became very ill, dying soon after.  The family descended into extreme poverty and he was expelled from school for inability to pay but, eventually, Levitan was given a scholarship in recognition of his prodigious artistic abilities.  When he was seventeen, his works were exhibited for the first time.  He received good notices in the press, and in the following years became increasingly successful, prolific and much celebrated.

Moon at Twilight, 1899.

Birch Forest, 1885-1889.

Much of his best known work has been described as being "the landscape of mood", in which nature is somehow spiritualized, and seems to reflect aspects of the human soul, a type of landscape painting that could only be Russian.  His work is a perfect example of a crisp, Impressionist-influenced realism, which still manages to be inherently and profoundly poetic; perhaps it comes as little surprise that Anton Chekhov was his closest friend. 

The Evening After the Rain, 1879.

Vladimirka Road, 1892.

Moonlit Night, Highway, 1897-98.

He had been ill for some time, and in 1897 Levitan was diagnosed with degenerative heart disease, possibly as a result of the lingering effects of the abject poverty of his youth.  He died three years later at the age of thirty-nine.

Autumn.

Water Lilies, 1895.

A Train on its Journey.

The Quiet Abode, 1890.

By the Deep Waters, 1892.