Cut-down Birch-trees

In 1864 Shishkin was abroad on a travelling scholarship from the Imperial Academy of Arts, and that summer he was working in and around Düsseldorf alongside other Russian painters. This small sheet, less than half a metre wide, is oil on paper, the kind of study a landscape painter made outdoors in a single sitting. Nothing on it says where these birches lay. What it shows is plain. A few felled logs lie on the forest floor, the white bark cracked and peeling, the sawn ends showing their rings, green shoots already pushing up between them. There is no sky and no horizon, so the study reads almost like a still life. The signature and date sit in the lower left corner. The Russian Museum acquired it in 1956 from a private owner in Leningrad.