Foggy morning

Shishkin painted this river at dawn in 1885. A grassy bank slopes down in front, the water barely moves, and the wooded shore opposite is still half lost in mist. It is a big canvas, well over a metre wide, and before the revolution it belonged to the Orlov-Davydovs, a family of counts whose country estate at Simbilei lay in the Nizhny Novgorod province.

In April 1918 the Soviet government abolished inheritance by decree. When an owner died, everything passed to the state. Over the following years the Nizhny Novgorod museum took in thousands of requisitioned works from noble collections, among them those of the Orlov-Davydovs and the Sheremetevs, and that is how this quiet landscape came to hang in a public gallery. It arrived from Simbilei together with two older pictures from the same house, a portrait of an unknown woman by the 18th-century painter Fyodor Rokotov and Karl Bryullov's scene of a girl telling her fortune.