Mittag. Umgebung von Moskau

The motif came out of a summer Shishkin spent in 1866 at Bratsevo, a village on the edge of Moscow, filling sketchbooks with a rutted road running through open fields. He was 34, newly back in Russia after years of study abroad in Duesseldorf. Three years later he worked those studies up into this canvas and did something he rarely did, handing almost half the picture to the sky and the clouds massing over the harvest. Pavel Tretyakov bought it. It was the first Shishkin he owned, and from then on he took at least one Shishkin out of every exhibition he went to, which is how the gallery in Moscow came to hold the painter in such depth.