Fir Forest on the Kama River

In Russian this painting goes by a place name, Bogaty Log, which means something like Rich Ravine. It was a small settlement on the northern edge of the Big Bor, a pine forest just east of Yelabuga, the town on the Kama river where Shishkin grew up. In 1877 he painted the view from the high ground there, in autumn, looking down over the treetops to the Kama and the flat country running away beyond it. The gallery in Perm that owns the canvas points to the tall pine rising above the firs and the mixed woods, painted almost like a portrait, with a character of its own. Eight years later Shishkin went back to the same view in an etching, From the Banks of the Kama near Yelabuga, changing some details. The settlement is gone now. The forest has been part of the Lower Kama National Park since 1991, and from its northern edge the view in the painting can still be made out.