Copse

Shishkin painted this in 1872, and two years later Kuzma Soldatenkov bought it from the Wanderers' third travelling exhibition in Moscow. Soldatenkov was a textile merchant who became a publisher of cheap editions of Russian writers, and one of the few men in Moscow then buying contemporary Russian painting. After 1917 his collection was nationalised, and in 1928 the State Museum Fund, which was parcelling out confiscated private galleries to museums around the country, sent this canvas more than 4,000 kilometres east to Irkutsk. It went to a museum that had itself begun as a private gallery, assembled by Vladimir Sukachev, a mayor of the city. The picture is over two metres wide and shows the edge of a wood at midday, which is why it also carries the title Noon.