Isaac Ilyich Levitan (Isaak Il’ich Levitan) was one of the greatest of Russian landscape painters, one of the greatest Russian painters in general, and one of the great landscape painters in the history of art.

Born into a poor family, he managed to begin study at the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture when his family moved to Moscow in the late 1860’s. While at school, he lost both of his parents within two years of each other and was left without resources, but was allowed to continue at the school, his tuition waved, because of his extraordinary talent.

He was greatly influenced by his teachers, Alexei Savrasov and Vasily Polenov. The latter shared a penchant for light-filled plein air painting with the French painters of the Barbizon School, who would also be an influence on Levitan.

Levitan didn’t paint urban landscapes, preferring the lyrical countryside, and created his own branch of the Russian style of landscape known as “the landscape of mood”. His occasional forays into the sunny and brightly colored fields made popular by the Impressionist painters are balanced by many paintings of cloud filled or overcast skies, great shadows across the land and dark masses of trees, though often with hints of breaking light, or impending change.

You will sometimes see Levitan mentioned in concert with the Russian Impressionist painters. Though he had an appreciation and talent for handling color and light in keeping with the young French painters, he rejected Monet’s Impressionism. He remained essentially a realist, but his later work was emotional and romantic in a way that is suggestive of Symbolism. For an excellent article on this direction in his work, and Levitan in general, see Michael Hirsch’s “Good Evening from Isaac Levitan” on Articles & Texticles. There is also a good article on Gurney Journey, titled “Plein Air and Poetry“, comparing one of Levitan’s studies with the finished piece.

Levitan’s place in Russian culture has been compared to that of the writer Anton Checkov, who became one of his closest friends. Levitan exhibited with the Peredvizhniky (Itinerants), a group that included his teacher Vasily Polenov, along with Ivan Kramskoy, Ilya Repin, Ivan Shishkin, Vasily Surikov and other great Russian realist painters.

Levitan was prolific, leaving behind over a thousand works.

Jan Toorop (also known as Jean Theodoro Toorop or Johannes Theodorus Toorop) was a Dutch Symbolist painter with a wonderfully unique style.

He was born in Purworedjo, Java, at a time when Java was a Dutch colony. Ne moved to the Netherlands in 1872 and studied in Delft and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

Toorop’s work fits loosely into the category of Symbolist painting (a bit of a grab bag to begin with), as well as Art Nouveau. At times in his career he flirted with various styles, including Realism, Impressionism, Pointillism and Applied art.

His paintings combined both European and Javanese elements and aesthetics. The long thin arms of the figures in the image above, bottom, are indicative of Javanese shadow theatre.

In The Young Generation (image above, top), we see Toorop’s young daughter, Charley, seated in her high-chair, arms outstretched toward the strange and wondrous world that beckons her. Charley Toorop would also become a respected artist, as would her son.

In addition to his gallery work, Jan Toorop also created book illustrations, posters and stained glass designs.

There is an extensive site devoted to the artist, The Jan Toorop Research Center, which has a comprehensive gallery of his works, arranged by year, along with a bio, writings and section devoted to his experiments with different art movements.

Michigan born painter Sally Tharp graduated from the University of Rhode Island with a BFA, but considers herself a self-taught painter.

Her web site features several series of painting themes, including outdoor sign letters and a series of still life objects on shelves and other still life subjects.

Her primary focus, however, is a wonderful series that she calls Glass Paintings, featuring a variety of glass objects that prominently include home canning jars, apothecary bottles, glass marbles and coke bottles.

These are marvels of refraction and reflection, often with multiple objects arranged behind one another, and cropped close, creating a sort of refractive geometric lattice of color, within which are the representational characteristics of the image.

Tharp has a blog called Sally is Painting Today in which she posts images of current works, oil sketches on different subjects, including her contributions to Karin Jurick’s Different strokes from Different Folks (see my posts here and here).

She also occasionally posts images of her work hung in galleries, from which you can see the large scale of her paintings, such as this image of the painting at top, Sometimes I Feel Like You Look Right Through Me.