"He is a poet in paint, with an original and powerful talent to reproduce nature." This is how Nikolai Dubovskoy was described by one contemporary, and looking at these majestic mountains shrouded in clouds, at the small town nestling at their feet, and at the choppy waters of Lake Maggiore we can see why the artist was called a master of “pure landscape vision”. Well-educated and intelligent, Dubovskoy loved to travel, visiting Greece, Turkey, France and Germany many times. In 1895 he went to Italy and Switzerland, and it was probably during that trip that he painted "At Lake Maggiore", which translates literally from Italian as the "Great Lake". The artist worked in the open air and dedicated himself entirely to his painting. During the second half of the 1880s, Dubovskoy exhibited with luminaries such as Viktor Vasnetsov, Valentin Serov, Konstantin Korovin, and Isaac Levitan. Their contemporaries considered Levitan to be "one of Dubovskoy’s strongest competitors", and Tretyakov himself followed Dubovskoy’s work closely. The artist’s legacy includes about 400 paintings and 1,000 sketches.