Birch grove

In 1878 Ivan Shishkin unveiled 'Rye', the wide field of grain and lone pines that became his best-known picture, and audiences at the Wanderers' exhibitions came to expect that grandeur from him. This birch grove comes from the same year, worked at a completely different scale. Instead of a landscape seen across a valley, he stands close among the trunks, near enough to read the peeling bark and the play of light on the ground. Shishkin was trained almost as a botanist of the forest, and friends said he knew every kind of moss underfoot. The birch was the tree Russians treated as their own, and he painted it without sentiment, trunk by trunk, the way a naturalist would. The canvas is small, the kind of thing made on the spot rather than built up in the studio. It now hangs a long way from any northern birchwood, in the National Art Museum of Azerbaijan in Baku.