Isaac Levitan

Isaac Levitan painted Russian landscape without people in it and somehow made it feel inhabited. Empty roads, thawing rivers, a chapel on a bank, weather coming in. Chekhov was a close friend, and the two share a way of leaving the important thing unstated.

His life was harder than the paintings suggest. Born into a poor Jewish family in Lithuania, orphaned as a teenager, he was twice expelled from Moscow under laws restricting Jewish residence, once after an assassination attempt on the Tsar. He kept working through it.

Vladimirka, painted in 1892, shows the road along which prisoners were marched to Siberia. Nothing in the picture explains that. It is a rutted track under a heavy sky, and the knowledge does all the work. He died at thirty nine, having produced several hundred canvases and a large number of studies.