Dandelions

Isaac Levitan's Dandelions (1889) is a characteristic work from the Russian landscape painter who would become the defining voice of Russian lyric landscape — the painter whom Chekhov most admired and with whom he maintained a close artistic friendship. Levitan's dandelion paintings are among his most quietly profound works: the common spring flower depicted with the emotional intensity he brought to all his landscape subjects, finding in the familiar weed a subject for meditation on transience, beauty, and the Russian spring. His dandelion studies connect to the entire Russian tradition of finding the sacred in the ordinary.

Levitan renders the dandelions with a combination of careful botanical observation and emotional investment that gives his flower paintings their distinctive character. His palette for spring dandelions is warm and golden — the specific intense yellow of the flowers against the green of surrounding meadow — captured with the light-keyed freshness of plein air observation. His brushwork is varied and sensitive, the yellow flower heads rendered through accumulated marks that convey both their specific form and the larger meadow impression they create.