Works by Ivan Shishkin

Ivan Shishkin built his forest landscapes on close study of nature, painting conifer and oak woods through the changing seasons with bark, moss and still water set down in detail.

He trained at the Moscow School of Painting from 1852 to 1856, then under the landscape painter Sokrat Vorobyov at the Academy in St Petersburg. On a scholarship abroad he drew and painted animals from life in Zurich under Rudolf Koller, and there tried etching with aqua regia for the first time. In Düsseldorf some of his pen drawings were shown beside work by Andreas Achenbach.

Etching stayed with him for the rest of his life, and he gave it almost as much time as painting. In Before the Storm, an etching of 1873, a rutted road runs toward thatched huts under a sky worked in dense, crossing lines, with a flock of birds left white against it.

Nearly all the works below are paintings, every one a landscape and most of them forest. First Snow, from 1875, lays a thin white crust over the forest floor, broken by black pools that mirror the trees. In Oak Grove of 1887 broad, sunlit oak trunks rise out of long grass. In the Wild North…, from 1891, shows a lone conifer heavy with snow on a rocky edge under a dark blue sky.

Sources: Wikipedia, Kiev National Picture Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.