Sokolniki. Autumn

Sokolniki. Autumn was painted in 1879 when Levitan was barely nineteen years old and still a student at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Sokolniki was a popular forest park on the northeastern edge of Moscow where Muscovites of all classes came for leisure walks, and its autumnal allées were a favoured subject for students. The painting shows a solitary female figure walking away from the viewer along a leaf-strewn path beneath birch and fir trees, and it is notable as the sole work by Levitan to contain a human figure painted by another hand — the figure was added by his fellow student Nikolai Chekhov, brother of Anton. The canvas was purchased by Pavel Tretyakov directly from the student exhibition, marking Levitan's first significant sale and launching his professional reputation. Its quiet mood and confident handling of dappled autumn light already anticipate the emotional directness that would characterise his mature landscapes.

The painting demonstrates precocious technical assurance for a nineteen-year-old. The path is described through tonal recession, with yellow leaves becoming smaller and cooler in the distance. The surrounding woodland is handled with loosely blended passages of ochre, sienna, and grey-green. The female figure — added by Nikolai Chekhov — is painted with somewhat stiffer, more linear strokes that sit slightly apart from Levitan's looser touch.