Vladimirka (painting)

Isaac Levitan · 1892

The story

Vladimirka (Russian: Владимирка) is an 1892 oil painting by the Russian artist Isaac Levitan. The painting depicts the Vladimir Highway, a dirt road leading east from Moscow to Vladimir. Vladimirka is one of three large paintings by Levitan completed in the first half of the 1890s. Together with By the Pool (1892) and Over Eternal Peace (1894), they are sometimes referred to as Levitan's "gloomy trilogy".

Levitan began sketching Vladimirka in 1892, when he was living in the Vladimir Governorate of the Russian Empire. The painting was completed in Moscow the same year. It was displayed at the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions' 21st exhibition in February 1893, which opened in Saint Petersburg and then moved to Moscow in March. Levitan donated the painting to the Tretyakov Gallery in March 1894, where it is still housed today.

According to artist Mikhail Nesterov, Vladimirka could be "boldly called a Russian historical landscape, of which there are few in our art". Art historian Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov described the painting as one of Levitan's best; it was his "universally recognised masterpiece", in which "deep social content is expressed organically and directly in the landscape".

Artist: Isaac Levitan
Date: 1892
Collection: Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Story adapted from the Wikipedia article and its contributors, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Facts from Wikidata (CC0). Image: Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

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