Konstantin Savitsky

One of the most reproduced paintings in Russia shows a family of bear cubs clambering over a fallen pine in the morning mist. It is credited to Ivan Shishkin, the great painter of Russian forests. The bears, though, were painted by Konstantin Savitsky.

The two were friends, and in 1889 Savitsky suggested adding the animals to Shishkin's forest and then painted them himself. Both men signed the finished canvas. When the collector Pavel Tretyakov bought it for his Moscow gallery, he wanted a Shishkin, and by one well-known account he called for turpentine and wiped Savitsky's signature off the surface. The bears stayed. The name did not.

Savitsky was a serious figure in his own right, a member of the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, who broke from the official academy to take realist painting to ordinary Russian life. His own best-known work, 'Repair Work on the Railway' from 1874, packs a raw embankment with labourers hauling earth, the kind of unglamorous modern scene the Wanderers wanted the public to actually look at. He later ran the art school in Penza, a provincial city southeast of Moscow, in his final years.