The Russian School of Painting
themselves to their model. Nature is broad and many-sided, and these artists endeavour, each working in his chosen field, to render her multiform and complex beauty.
In the eighties and nineties Moscow produced several other artists, who side by side with Levitan furthered the development of Russian landscape painting. All these masters worked in close connection with Levitan, and it is impossible to determine what they owe to each other. It was a common fireplace, where different artistic personalities burned, and kindled each other. True, Levitan's flame blazed most brilliantly and conspicuously, but it cannot be asserted that it set on fire the rest or that it had been kindled by them.
Nesterov, and especially Syerov and Korovin, were together with Levitan the creators of Russian landscape painting. Each of them brought into his art a peculiar light, a beauty, and a divination of his own. Nesterov, in the landscapes of his pictures, promised to be a great and poetic artist. He discovered the gloomy solemnity of the northern forest, the grey silence, the "moods" of Russian nature, replete with quiet emotion and suspense. In the backgrounds of his pictures devoted to St. Sergius there is rendered the pensive, religious aspect of our landscape, the softness of the rainy atmosphere, the frailness of the vegeta-
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