Deciduous Forest. Etude

Shishkin made this in 1897, the last full year he worked. He died the following March in his studio, in front of an unfinished canvas. It is an etude, oil on cardboard rather than canvas, about 62 by 41 centimetres, the size a painter carries out to the trees and back. He is remembered for pines, for ship timber and sunlit trunks, and here he is in a broadleaf wood instead. The path that curls away between the trees looks as though it runs deeper into the forest. It leads to a house, barely picked out in the thicket. The picture is in Kazan, where Shishkin went to the First Gymnasium as a boy, about 200 kilometres from Yelabuga on the Kama, the town he was born in and kept going back to. Two of his paintings reached that museum in 1898, months after his death. It now holds some 40 of his paintings and around 400 prints.