Backwoods

In 1872 Shishkin sent this to the second exhibition of the Wanderers, the realist painters who had broken with the Imperial Academy of Arts two years earlier and were touring their own shows through the Russian provinces. The next year that same Academy made him a professor, and it was this canvas that earned him the rank. Nothing in it is picturesque. Soft moss, standing water, old stumps and dead branches fill the foreground, and the light comes down in scraps through the crowns onto a space that closes in rather than opens out. Shishkin was 40 when he painted it, and he had spent 15 years filling sketchbooks with single trees, roots and fallen branches to be able to build a whole forest this way.