Forest

The Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts dates this canvas to 1880, the start of the decade in which Shishkin painted some of his best-known forests. It is a fair size, 83 by 110 centimetres, and it looks into a spruce wood with a few pale birch trunks, opening onto a sunlit clearing. The museum's own description dwells on that light, the sun reaching the grass and the far trees, and on how finely Shishkin varied the green from one spruce branch to the next. People have been at work here. Stumps stand in the grass, and felled trunks lie across the foreground, grown over with moss and scattered with dead branches.