Dam

This is a small oil, about 26 by 34 centimetres, and its subject is as plain as a landscape gets. A stream has been dammed into a still pool, with grass and weeds crowding its banks. Shishkin painted it in 1895, when he was 63, the year his short spell as head of the landscape studio at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg came to an end. Writers on this picture point to the short strokes that catch the movement on the water's surface, the hand of a painter who was also a skilled draughtsman and etcher.