Golden Autumn

By the late 1880s Ivan Shishkin was, more than any other Russian painter, the man of the forest. His name rested on large exhibition canvases of pine woods rendered so precisely you could almost name the species. This is him in a quieter register: a small autumn landscape from 1888, trees turning gold at the edge of still water. There is no grand incident in it, and none is needed. Shishkin had trained as an exacting student of real trees before he was anything else, and that patience for how a wood is actually built is what he brings even to a canvas this modest. It hangs today in the art museum in Perm, in the Urals.