Birken nach dem Sturm

In 1871 a group of Russian painters who had broken with the Academy opened their first travelling exhibition in Petersburg, and Shishkin was one of the founding members. He was 39, and the argument he had spent a decade making was that an ordinary Russian forest needed no Italian scenery to be worth a large canvas. This is one of his storm pictures. Leaning and broken birches, torn ground, the mess a night of wind leaves in a wood, a motif he went back to for the rest of his life. It hangs in Kazan for a reason. Shishkin was born upriver at Yelabuga on the Kama, in what is now Tatarstan, and the museum there holds more of his work than anywhere except the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum.