Landscape with Fern (In Bor. Autumn)

Landscape with Fern (In Bor. Autumn), executed in pastel around 1894, demonstrates Levitan's occasional forays into works on paper using dry colour media. The subject — a forest interior in early autumn with prominent fern growth in the foreground — belongs to his broader investigation of woodland interiors as enclosed, meditative spaces. Pastel gave him a freedom from the drying time of oil and allowed rapid response to shifting natural light. Bor, a location in the Tver region he visited repeatedly, offered dense birch and fir woods that filtered light in complex ways. The presence of ferns as a foreground motif is relatively unusual in his work, which more often preferred open landscape subjects; their detailed, pattern-making fronds suggest he was drawn here by a specific visual phenomenon. The work's present location is not fully documented, but pastel studies from this period survive in various Russian regional collections.

Pastel's characteristic chalky texture gives the work a softness absent from Levitan's oil paintings. The fern fronds in the foreground are described with careful directional strokes that follow their natural branching structure. Atmospheric depth is achieved through progressively simpler, lighter marks in the distance. The lack of blending in many passages preserves the layered vibrancy typical of pastel used in a painterly rather than illustrative manner.