At the Edge of the Pine Forest

Shishkin painted this in 1897, the last full year of his life. On a March morning in 1898 he sat down at his easel to begin a new forest scene, felt unwell, and died there in his studio. For more than 30 years he had painted almost nothing but the Russian forest, and he knew it the way a botanist does, every kind of pine and the way light moves through the branches. He had grown up in Yelabuga, a small town in wooded country on the Kama river far to the east, and he kept going back to those trees to the end. What he gives here is plain, the edge where the pines break off and the open ground begins, the ordinary boundary of a forest he had been studying his whole working life.