A Pine on the Rock

Ivan Shishkin made this study in 1855, while he was still a student at the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, a year before he moved on to the Academy in Saint Petersburg. It is small, about 39 by 31 centimetres, painted in oil on paper and later mounted on cardboard, and it shows a single pine, its crown heavy with needles and its trunk rising out of dark undergrowth. The Russian Museum describes it as the earliest painting by Shishkin in its collection, and restored it specially for its large retrospective of his forests, which opened in spring 2026. The motif of a lone pine on a height stayed with him. In 1891 he painted one standing alone on a snowy northern cliff, for a poem by Mikhail Lermontov that begins with exactly that image.