Dusk. Haystacks

Dusk. Haystacks, painted in 1899 on cardboard and held in the Tretyakov Gallery, belongs to the final productive phase of Levitan's life when he was consciously collecting impressions of rural Russia against the knowledge that his health was failing. The subject — haystacks in evening light — invites comparison with Monet's celebrated Haystacks series from 1890-1891, though Levitan's approach is quieter and more melancholic, without the French painter's interest in recording the full spectrum of light through colour temperature changes. Instead, Levitan used the darkening forms of the stacks against a luminous evening sky to create a mood of settled calm and ending. The small cardboard format suits the intimacy of the scene: this is a painting of a specific evening in a specific field, not a serial investigation of phenomena. Its directness and economy are characteristic of his late work, when he had stripped away everything inessential.

Evening light is conveyed through a warm-cool contrast between the fading orange glow on the horizon and the blue-grey tonality that settles over the haystacks and foreground. The cardboard ground contributes warmth to areas of thin paint. The haystacks themselves are rendered with rounded, blended strokes that give them solid presence against the more vaporous sky. Levitan's brushwork in this period shows increasing economy — more is said with each mark.