By the seashore

In the summer of 1889 Shishkin travelled north to Petrozavodsk, on Lake Onega, and then worked for a while on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, at a village the Tretyakov Gallery records as Meri-Khovi. Most of what he painted there was forest, as usual. This study turns toward the water, and open coastline is rare among his oil studies. He set up at the top of a bank and looked down along a curve of pale sand that draws the eye out to sea, with a dense green wood crowding the beach. The foreground is done in small touches, heads of wild flowers barely marked with the brush, grass around stones warm from the sun, thin shrub branches. Pavel Tretyakov, the Moscow merchant who was building a national gallery, bought the study from Shishkin himself.