Evening

In 1871 a group of Russian painters put on their first travelling exhibition and walked out on the official Academy in Saint Petersburg. They called themselves the Wanderers, and the idea was plain: carry art across the country to ordinary people, and paint the Russia those people actually lived in, instead of gods and Roman heroes. Shishkin was one of the founders, and this wide canvas is exactly what that meant in practice. There is no story in it and no myth, only a stretch of Russian country as the day's light goes. He had spent years studying in Germany before coming home to give the rest of his life to native forests and fields. He liked to say one should look for nature at its simplest, and here that is the whole picture.