Ivan Shishkin

To generations of Russians, Ivan Shishkin is the man who painted the forest itself. He worked like a naturalist, filling sketchbooks with bark, roots, ferns and fallen branches in the pine and oak woods of central Russia, learning a single stand of trees before he built a whole canvas from it.

He trained in Moscow in the 1850s and then at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, with years of study in Düsseldorf, in western Germany, where collectors were already buying his precise pencil drawings of the countryside. Back home he became a founding member of the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, realist painters who broke from the official Academy in 1870 and sent their own exhibitions travelling across the Russian Empire. His 1878 canvas Rye, a dirt track running through a vast sunlit grainfield under towering pines, became a national image of the Russian land.

His most famous picture was partly another man's hand. Morning in a Pine Forest, from 1889, shows a misty clearing with a she-bear and three cubs, and the bears were painted by his friend and fellow Wanderer Konstantin Savitsky. A dealer rubbed out Savitsky's signature, so only Shishkin's name reached the public. The scene grew so beloved that in Soviet times it was printed on a chocolate wrapper, which is where most Russians first met it.

Shishkin kept painting outdoors into his sixties. He died in 1898 in his St Petersburg studio, collapsing at his easel while at work on a new forest canvas.