Golden Autumn, 1895 Isaac Ilyich Levitan (1860-1900)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Isaac Ilyich Levitan also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Golden Autumn is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A narrow, mirror‑like river slices diagonally through an expanse of meadow, its dark, slow water drawing the eye inward and back toward a low horizon. On the left, a stand of slender birches, their trunks already whitening with age, trembles beneath cascades of saffron foliage. The right bank remains comparatively austere, its grasses bleached to olive and ochre, while distant copses soften into a muted grey‑green. Above, a lucid September sky, streaked with feathery cirrus, offers a cool counterpoint to the heat of the leaves below. Everything is poised between fullness and relinquishment: the countryside seems to inhale before the first frost.

Levitan’s palette is dominated by a spectrum of golds—cadmium, Naples, raw sienna—set against the tempered blues of water and sky. Those yellows are neither decorative nor merely seasonal; they act as reservoirs of light, banking the summer’s energy just before it disperses. Where sunlight glances off birch bark, the painter slips in flicks of ivory, intensifying contrast without resorting to theatrical glare. The chromatic tension—warm earth against lucid air—produces a vibration that is felt more than seen, a quiet resonance that hints at transience.

The painter’s handling remains assured yet open‑textured. Oil lies on the canvas in quick, broken strokes, especially across the sloping foreground where grasses are rendered in tangled skeins of pigment. By altering pressure and the charge of the brush, Levitan coaxes a surprising breadth of surface—from buttery impasto in the foliage to thin, translucent washes along the watercourse. These alternations between opacity and translucency conjure the sensation of moving air and the faint shimmer of cobwebs catching late light.

Structurally, the work is anchored by the river’s axial thrust, bisecting the image while subtly zig‑zagging through it. The eye is invited to travel: from the bright birches at left, across the reflective channel, toward the single, flame‑coloured tree that punctuates the middle ground, and finally to the remote village roofs that dot the horizon. The geometry is simple yet eloquent, its asymmetry lending rhythm and breathing space to what might otherwise be pastoral cliché.

Painted in 1895, the canvas belongs to the so‑called “major” cycle that also includes March and Fresh Wind. Volga. At this moment Russian landscape painting was shifting from descriptive naturalism to the more introspective “mood landscape”, and Levitan served as its chief exponent. Rather than celebrating heroic vistas, he sought emotional temperature—those transitional instants when nature seems to whisper its own mortality. In Golden Autumn the result is both lyrical and measured: a clear‑eyed meditation on time, captured at the exact point where brilliance tips toward decline.