Overcast Day Isaac Ilyich Levitan (1860-1900)

Description of Isaac Levitan’s painting "An Overcast Day".

Levitan is the most Russian of all Russian painters, a singer of earth and sky, conveying with paintings the inner state of the soul and believing that the greatest beauty is hidden in nature. Despite his miserable childhood and hungry youth, he did not lose his ability to see beauty - his faithful eye, accurate hand, attention to detail and the ability to see beauty where no one else was given to see it made him great.

"An Overcast Day." - is one of his landscapes - and Levitan painted exclusively landscapes, as if focusing on the one thing that deserved his attention. He depicts a simple village - a few houses, a log well, fences and trampled paths, which will sprawl into wet mush at the first rain.

The trees sway in the wind, touching the sky with their branches, in the distance you can see the forest, which like a wall fences off the tiny settlement from the rest of the world. The sky is covered with clouds, not even a glimmer of sunlight can be seen. It hangs low over the land, laid down in broad, generous strokes, and by evening it will probably rain. Like a wet blanket it covers the earth.

On the road walking man - his figure is outlined in a cursory, barely, a few strokes, as if the artist was no more than a part of the landscape, like a leaf or a peg in the fence, as if he is just the natural part of the world and there is no reason to pay too much attention to him. People in Levitan’s paintings appear only in this position - they are there, they are outlined vividly and simply, but attention is not focused on them. They are a part, not the best and not the worst.

The village is waiting for the rain to fall. It all seems extinct, frozen in this expectation - the way a person sometimes waits for disaster, knowing that it is bound to happen and having no way to turn it aside.

Anxious anticipation is the basic mood this painting conveys.