Fly-agarics. Study

Shishkin painted this out in the forest on a scrap of canvas about the size of a postcard, roughly 14 by 21 centimetres, later laid down on cardboard. It is a study, the kind of thing he made by the hundred as raw material for large canvases. The year was 1878, when he finished Rye, the wide field of grain that became his best known picture and went into Pavel Tretyakov's collection in Moscow. Critics of the day argued about whether his kind of accuracy was painting or botany. He went on recording mosses, lichens, grasses and mushrooms at close range anyway, and Tretyakov bought this little board of fly agarics too, before 1893.