Forest lodge

Shishkin worked a forest the way other painters worked a sitter, going back to the same stands of spruce and pine with a sketchbook season after season and building the studio canvas out of what he carried home. This one is from 1892, when he was 60 and the best-known landscape painter in Russia, and the subject is ordinary working woodland, a keeper's hut standing under the trees rather than a famous view. How it came to be in Bishkek is a separate story. The gallery there opened on 1 January 1935 with 72 Russian pictures sent out from the Tretyakov Gallery and the education commissariat in Moscow, and Russian painting of the 19th century has been the strongest part of the collection ever since.