A Quiet Monastery

1890 · Painting · 87.5 × 108 cm

May one see it?

Unknown: the museum keeps its counsel

Tretyakov Gallery

Moscow, Russia

The owner is known. Whether it is on view today, the museum does not say, and we were not trained to guess.

Source: The museum's own collection data

On the map Museum page

About the painting

A Quiet Monastery is a landscape by Russian artist Isaak Levitan (1860–1900), painted in 1890. It belongs to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow (inventory number Zh-584). Its size is 87.5×108 cm.

This painting, in which Levitan weaves together his impressions of a number of monasteries he visited, was completed in 1890 after his trip to Upper Volga. In 1891, the painting was exhibited at the 19th exhibition of the Association of Travelling Art Exhibitions ("Peredvizhniki"), which was held in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow. "A Quiet Monastery" was a great success with the visitors of the exhibition and received high marks from the art critics, which finally confirmed the recognition of Levitan as one of the leading Russian landscape painters.

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In the same year, 1891, the canvas was purchased for one of the private collections. After the revolution, the trace of the painting was lost, and its whereabouts remained unknown until 1960, when it was "found" in the private collection of the conductor Nikolai Golovanov. In 1970, the painting "A Quiet Monastery" was transferred to the State Tretyakov Gallery.

According to art critic Vladimir Stasov, "A Quiet Monastery" is Levitan's best painting "in the beauty and poetry of the tones of the evening sun". The art historian Alexei Fedorov-Davydov considers it to be one of Levitan's series of "mood landscapes," noting that this painting "was a kind of final stage of his long-standing work on the Volga," and that it "not only does not contradict Levitan's previous work, but follows naturally from it". Art historian Faina Maltseva wrote that the image created by the artist in "A Quiet Monastery" is "multifaceted in its content", creating in the soul "a feeling of peace, and quiet lyrical sadness, and rapturous admiration for the beauty of the summer evening".

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