Birch Grove

This is a small canvas, a little over half a metre tall, painted in 1884, when Shishkin was best known for large forest pictures. Smaller pieces like this one ran alongside them. It is a close view of a stand of birches, the white trunks showing through thick summer leaves, a young fir tucked in among them, and the ground below done in browns and greens where the daylight falls. The picture is in Kazan, at the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan. Shishkin was born in Yelabuga, a town on the Kama river in the same region, and by the museum’s own count it holds the third-largest collection of his work in Russia, after the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum, with 38 paintings, 25 drawings and more than 350 prints.