Above Eternal Peace

At the edge of a cliff in Levitan's Above Eternal Peace, a small wooden Orthodox chapel sits above a graveyard. It is a real chapel, but it is in the wrong place. Levitan painted the landscape at Lake Udomlya, and decided the modern church actually visible from there was wrong for the mood. So he pulled from memory a sketch he had made five years earlier of an old wooden church in Plyos, on the Volga. He painted the Plyos church into a place it had never stood in. The real church burned down in 1903, when local boys smoking pigeons out of the roof set fire to it by accident. The only place it still exists is here. Now at Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow @tretyakov_gallery