Shishkin's Forests
Ivan Shishkin painted the Russian forest for most of his working life, tree by tree, with a precision that lets you tell a pine from a fir by its bark.
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About the series
Shishkin grew up in Yelabuga, a small town on the Kama river surrounded by pine forest, and trained in Moscow, at the Academy in Saint Petersburg and then in Düsseldorf. The early Swiss and German subjects here, a beech wood in Switzerland and the Teutoburg Forest, come from those years abroad. Back in Russia he joined the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, who turned away from the Academy to paint Russian life and land.
He drew constantly from nature, and his forests are full of things a botanist would recognise: moss on stones, ferns, felled trunks, the different light under oaks and under pines. Morning in a Pine Forest, from 1889, with bear cubs on a fallen tree, is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The bears were painted by his friend Konstantin Savitsky. Rain in an Oak Forest, from 1891, is in the same museum.
These are calm, green paintings with a lot of depth. A wide forest view can open up a room that has no window onto trees.
