Autumn

In 1891 Shishkin was given the halls of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg for an exhibition of his own, a few months before his 60th birthday. What he put on the walls was the working material behind the famous forests, roughly 300 studies painted outdoors and 200 drawings, some of them more than 40 years old. Russian audiences knew him for the big finished forest pictures, and here was the evidence of how those had been assembled. He painted this autumn landscape the year after that show, in 1892, working the way the exhibition had defended, outdoors and in front of the subject. He went on doing it until his death in 1898.