Flowers on the Edge of the Forest

Shishkin was the first Russian painter to hang his open-air studies in public exhibitions as works in their own right, instead of keeping them in the studio as raw material for something bigger. This is one of them, painted across 1892 and 1893, a whole clearing of ground elder and cow parsnip at the edge of a wood with the white umbrella-shaped heads worked out flower by flower. That exactness had a source. As a young man he studied at the academy in Düsseldorf, where a number of his fellow students earned their living drawing plates for botanical handbooks and atlases. The critic Alexandre Benois, who had little patience for Shishkin's big set-piece canvases, thought the studies were where his real worth lay. The Tretyakov Gallery bought this one in 1935 from Alexei Langovoy, a Moscow doctor who collected Russian painting.