Countess Mordvinova's Wood. Peterhof

In the summer of 1891 Shishkin worked on a country estate on the Peterhof Road, the line of summer houses running along the Gulf of Finland west of St Petersburg. The land had belonged since 1822 to the family of Nikolai Mordvinov, an admiral and statesman, and that summer Shishkin painted four canvases there, this spruce wood among them. In November of the same year he opened a personal exhibition in the halls of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Most of it was studies, around 300 of them, but he added a few recently finished paintings, and this was one. Pavel Tretyakov, the Moscow merchant who was building a public gallery of Russian art, bought it from the show together with several of the studies. The museum's own description points to the golden patches of evening sky showing between the trunks, and to the small figure of an old man with a stick, walking through the wood.