Autumn. The road to the village. 1877 Isaac Ilyich Levitan (1860-1900)

Description of Isaac Levitan’s painting "Autumn. A Road in the Countryside."

Today Isaak Levitan is rightly called not just a painter, but a master of Russian landscapes. He managed to love it in all sorts of variations (both blooming and beggarly). That’s why such a miserable, unsightly and sad landscape is depicted on the canvas "Road in the village". The author painted the autumn landscape exactly in the period, dull and sad. At that time everything around fades, nature is dominated by unsightly, gray and dark colors. The master has managed to convey this mood with such precision, using only faint and completely unsightly shades. They can simply be called dark gray.

Late autumn, overcast, is before us. All the leaves have long since fallen. The dirt village road is thoroughly washed out by the rains. The sadness and pity in your soul when you look at it and imagine how difficult it is to move even a horse, not to mention a human, in such mud. The road on the canvas starts in the center, immediately in the foreground, and, winding a little, goes somewhere far away.

There are some bushes of dry grass on the side of the road. And it looks quite bright against the background of the dull autumn grayness.

A black strip of road divides the lower part of the lane almost in half. To the right of its edge is a large puddle of incredibly clear water. The painter also underlined its mirror effect (a classic technique of many artists). Not far away there are two large trees without leaves, so they look helpless. But with these vertical trunks Levitan marked the vertical perspective of the painting.

On either side of the road the peasants’ huts are spread out, which just like nature, look squalid, unsightly and pitiful. Only one crow on the canvas is alive, perched on a thin branch.

The autumn sky takes up most of the canvas, dull and gloomy and gray. Only a thin, bright blue stripe near the horizon. Snow will soon fall, blanketing the weary ground, and everything around will glisten in wonder. Longing and sadness, along with an incredible love for the innermost places are inherent in every stroke of this canvas.