Isaac Ilyich Levitan was a classical Russian landscape painter who advanced the genre of the "mood landscape". He was born in a shtetl of Kibarty, Augustów Governorate in Congress Poland a part of the Russian Empire (present-day Lithuania) into a poor but educated Jewish family. Isaac Levitan's hugely influential art heritage consists of more than a thousand paintings, among them watercolors, pastels, graphics and illustrations.
Levitan’s works were very successful, but his financial situation was often precarious. In 1889 Sergey Morozov, the famous Russian collector and patron of art, gave the painter a workshop at Bolshoy Tryokhsvyatitelsky pereulok where Levitan lived many productive and successful years until the end of his life.