The Good Will Foundation is delighted not only to contribute financially but to present as well the II International painting workshop called „In the Footsteps of Isaac Levitan“. Isaac Ilyich Levitan (August 30, 1860 – August 4 1900) was a classical Russian landscape painter who advanced the genre of the “mood landscape”.
Isaac Levitan was born in what is now known as Kybartai into a poor but educated Jewish family. At the beginning of 1870 the Levitan family moved to Moscow. In September 1873, Isaac Levitan entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture where his older brother Avel had already studied for two years. After a year in the copying class Isaac transferred into a naturalistic class, and soon thereafter into a landscape class. Levitan’s teachers were the famous Alexei Savrasov, Vasily Perov and Vasily Polenov.
Levitan’s work was a profound response to the lyrical charm of the Russian landscape. Levitan did not paint urban landscapes; with the exception of the View of Simonov Monastery (whereabouts unknown), mentioned by Nesterov, the city of Moscow appears only in the painting Illumination of the Kremlin. Isaac Levitan’s hugely influential art heritage consists of more than a thousand paintings, among them watercolors, pastels, graphics, and illustrations.
The idea behind the workshop is to celebrate the rich heritage of Isaac Levitan which is equally important to both Lithuanians and Russians. The painters who took part in this year‘s workshop all worked within the beautiful surroundings of Vilkaviskis county in order to follow „in the footsteps of Isaac Levitan“, i.e. to try and capture the same feel Levitan was able when he used to paint his pictures. The resulting works will be displayed across various public spaces in Kybartai and beyond.
Images captured during the workshop as well as a few images of Levitan’s paintings:
